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THE LURE AND THE LORE 
OF TRAVEL 



BY 
CARL VROOMAN 



li 

AND 



JULIA SCOTT VROOMAN 




BOSTON 

SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 

1914 






4* 



Copyright, 1914 
Sherman, French & Company 



» 



/-hT~ 



JOV 30 1914 

©CI.A387750 



TO 

EACH OTHER 



ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

Thanks are due the editors of the following 
magazines for permission to reprint the articles 
named below: The Outlook, " The Best Side of 
Paris " ; The Century Magazine, " The Strange 
Case of Robert Louis Stevenson and Jules Si- 
moneau "; The Arena, " Stevenson in San Fran- 
cisco," " An Awakening," " A Revised Version 
of Venice " ; The Twentieth Century Magazine, 
" The Italy of Our Dreams," " The Assisi of St. 
Francis and Sabatier," "Charles Wagner, a 
Social Mystic," "Touring Tuscany a la Bo- 
heme " ; La Follettes, " A Political Pilgrimage," 
" Arrividerci " under the title " An Apostle of 
Mazzini." 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I A Royal Road to Knowl- 
edge, by Carl Vrooman . . i 

II Picking up a Language, by 

Carl Vrooman . . . . 16 

III Living as Europeans Do, by 

Carl Vrooman .... 25 

IV The Best Side of Paris, by Carl 

Vrooman 44 

V Jean Jaures, Prophet of So- 
cial Redemption, by Carl 
Vrooman 56 

VI An Apostle of Light, by Carl 

Vrooman 66 

VII Charles Wagner — a Social 
Mystic, by Julia Scott Vroo- 
man .85 

VIII Uses and Abuses of Italian 

Travel, by Carl Vrooman . 106 

IX A Revised Version of Venice, 

by Julia Scott Vrooman . .122 



CHAPTER PAGE 

X The Assisi of St. Francis and 
Sabatier, by Julia Scott Vroo- 
man 142 

XI Touring Tuscany A la Bo- 
heme, by Carl Vrooman and 
Julia Scott Vrooman . . .168 

XII The Italy of our Dreams, by 

Julia Scott Vrooman . . .191 

XIII Rambles in Switzerland, by 

Carl Vrooman .... 205 

XIV An Awakening, by Julia Scott 

Vrooman 222 

XV A Political Pilgrimage, by 

Carl Vrooman . . . .235 

XVI The Strange Case of Robert 
Louis Stevenson and Jules 
Simoneau, by Julia Scott 
Vrooman 264 

XVII Stevenson in San Francisco, 

by Julia Scott Vrooman . .284 

XVIII Arrivederci, by Julia Scott 

Vrooman 292 



THE LURE AND THE LORE OF TRAVEL 



CHAPTER I 
A ROYAL ROAD TO KNOWLEDGE 

On a recent trip abroad our fellow passengers 
formed a rather more amusing scratch collec- 
tion of human beings than is usually to be found 
even on a trans-Atlantic liner. The weather 
was monotonously calm and the voyage singu- 
larly uneventful, save for some interesting con- 
versational " mixups " between people who, 
under any other conceivable circumstances, 
would never have taken each other seriously 
enough to talk together for five minutes at a 
time. 

I remember in particular two young women. 
One, called the " Merry Widow " because she 
was taking a long vacation from home and hus- 
band and native land, was suffering from a 
surplus of physical and emotional energy and a 
dearth of any acknowledged domestic, mental, 
or moral responsibilities. The other was af- 
flicted with a chronic case of ingrowing con- 
science, and on account of her abnormally de- 
veloped analytical powers, exercised chiefly in 
laying bare her own and other people's failings, 



2 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

was referred to by her fellow passengers as 
" Miss Ann Eliza." Both were going abroad 
for an indefinite sojourn. Both were full of 
plans and projects to be put into execution on 
their arrival, and each felt completely assured 
that she was on the one and only right track for 
making the most of her opportunities. 

One afternoon, after having been pleasantly 
diverted for some time, along with a number 
of other listeners, by a spirited discussion be- 
tween the two ladies as to the relative values 
of sundry ways and means of skimming the 
cream off of Europe, I was suddenly thrown 
into a state of panic by being called upon by both 
fair disputants to umpire the game. 

" As a seasoned globe-trotter," diplomatic- 
ally began Miss Ann Eliza, " what, according 
to your observation and experience, is the sur- 
est way to get the best out of Europe? Is it 
not true that to obtain the most satisfying re- 
sults one should studiously plan for a trip 
abroad and resolutely adhere to that plan? " 

" I never plan anything," laughed the Merry 
Widow; " I always go to the best hotels, the 
best shops, the best galleries, the best operas, 
and try to eat and drink, to buy and see and en- 
joy the best of everything. I have a policy, 
but I never make any plans." 



A ROYAL ROAD 3 

" I have known people," I remarked cau- 
tiously, " who have graduated from both your 
schools of travel. Undoubtedly, both courses 
are good — during the novitiate period — but 
I would not hesitate to prophesy that one or 
both of you will go in later for a post-graduate 
course that will open up new and undreamed-of 
worlds of absorbing interest." 

" You mean that we are both wrong? " ob- 
served Ann Eliza with merciless precision. 

" I mean that you are both right," I replied, 
" but both young. Even in your plans you 
have not yet exhausted your own possibilities 
nor those of Europe." 

" If you do not believe in turning a European 
trip into a bore," resumed the Merry Widow, 
" I am ready to listen to any and all your sug- 
gestions, but if I had intended to make work 
of travel, I would have stayed at home." 

" On one's first impressionistic foreign tour," 
I replied, " I am inclined to favor, as a method 
of travel, the way hedgehogs are said to eat 
their grapes, that is, rolling over in them and 
eating those that stick to their quills. If incli- 
nation be ever the best guide, surely it is on a 
journey in search of an answer to the essentially 
personal question — what does Europe mean to 
me?" 



4 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

" Bravo," cried the Merry Widow, clapping 
her little white hands enthusiastically. 

" If one has little or no intelligence, I can 
understand how that point of view would ap- 
peal to her," ejaculated Ann Eliza, looking 
pointedly at her antagonist, " but if one has a 
mind, I should think it might be just as well to 
use it." 

" Quite so," I replied, " but let us remember 
that the reasoning mind is not our only intel- 
lectual faculty, and hence, strange as it may 
seem, the problem of getting the most out of 
travel is not primarily one of industry and in- 
tellectual acumen but rather one of sympathy 
and emotional responsiveness. Just as our 
physical nourishment depends less upon what 
we eat than upon what we assimilate, so the 
growth of the mind and spirit depends less 
upon what we see than upon what we appreci- 
ate and make a part of ourselves. There is a 
mental and spiritual baggage which the traveler 
may bring home with him quite separate and 
distinct from his rich spoils of memory — a 
certain deposit in the soul, left often by the most 
fleeting impressions, which the artist may later 
work into his picture, which may enter unbid- 
den into some fugitive verse of the poet, or cast 
its forgotten halo about the lover's dream." 
(Applause from all the ladies.) 



A ROYAL ROAD 5 

" I often think," I continued, with growing 
confidence, " of what a Harvard professor said 
to me as I was starting on my first trip abroad. 
' A man can learn more/ he declared, ' loafing 
about Europe for a year than grinding away 
for the same length of time at the University. , 
If this be true, then the most important ques- 
tion to be decided, before embarking, would 
seem to be not what books to read, what lec- 
tures to attend, what studies to undertake — 
though all these have their importance — but 
how to live, how to establish the most intimate 
and agreeable possible relations with the peo- 
ple among whom for the time being your lot is 
to be cast. For unless one becomes sufficiently 
naturalized, mentally and emotionally, in a for- 
eign country to arrive at a reasonable approxi- 
mation of the native point of view, one is ex- 
tremely apt to miss what is best and most dis- 
tinctive about that country. While it is highly 
useful to have a working knowledge of another 
people's language and a nodding acquaintance 
with its literature, art, and history, all such in- 
formation that an outsider may acquire is apt 
to be inadequate, largely incomprehensible, 
and at times even misleading, unless one has 
learned by experience to adjust his mental 
lenses so as to see things in their normal rela- 



6 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

tions to their environment and in their true 
perspective." 

" I am in entire agreement with much that 
you have said," responded Ann Eliza thought- 
fully, " but the question is as to the how of get- 
ting all this. I am, perhaps, laboring under 
the delusion that there is ' no excellence with- 
out great labor.' " 

" If so," I interrupted, " I fear that is pre- 
cisely where you make your mistake. The 
world of the traveler is not the everyday, com- 
monplace world of routine, drudgery, and cold 
logic which we ordinarily inhabit, but a species 
of modern fairyland, a veritable dolce far 
niente, but one in which life is full to overflow- 
ing of zest and exhilaration, and where more 
information can be soaked in through the 
eyes, ears and pores of the skin than can be 
acquired by the hardest kind of mental gorg- 
ing in the usual laborious and time-honored 
ways." 

" If I catch your meaning," suggested the 
Merry Widow, " life abroad should be not a 
dull routine, but something more like — what 
shall I say ? — a continuous vaudeville per- 
formance or a long-drawn-out ' joy ride.' " 

" If you do not use those phrases in too lit- 
eral and too materialistic a sense, you have 
caught my meaning exactly." 



A ROYAL ROAD 7 

By this time Ann Eliza had almost reached 
the boiling-point of her righteous indignation, 
but holding herself well in hand, she said, 
" Just one other question. If life over here is 
to be all pleasure-seeking and receptivity, per- 
haps it might not be out of place to inquire as 
to what form of pleasures a person should spe- 
cialize in, and to what sort of influences one 
ought to throw open arms and soul. Surely it 
cannot be necessary to restrict one's self to 
what is cheap, superficial and tawdry. It is 
quite possible, and it might even be found de- 
sirable, to take advantage of a foreign tour, not 
to gratify one's commonest and vulgarest im- 
pulses, but to learn to enjoy those things, such 
as the highest forms of music, literature and 
art, which for thousands of years the best, the 
most refined and the most intelligent people of 
the world have found to be not only enjoyable, 
but instructive and ennobling." 

" You have struck the keynote," I replied 
with enthusiasm. " Without a doubt you have 
the right ideal, but I think I must insist that we 
have the right method. Have us instructed 
as much as you please, if only you will allow us 
to enjoy ourselves during the process." 

" But here let me make one point clear," I 
continued; " while a European tour should not 
be turned into a grind, at the same time on 



8 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

going abroad it would seem unnecessary to 
leave all one's moral and aesthetic impression- 
ability and mental curiosity at home in cold 
storage. To be sure, many tourists are consti- 
tutionally incapable of understanding, or even 
of contemplating sympathetically, the habits and 
customs of other peoples. Judging everybody 
and everything by the standards of their par- 
ticular country, section, or neighborhood, they 
miss what is most worth while and most delight- 
ful about a foreign tour. It matters not how 
many times such travelers may circumnavigate 
the globe, nor how much heterogeneous infor- 
mation they may manage to scrape together 
concerning various races and continents, — they 
will die as they were born — provincials. A 
certain attitude of open-mindedness and a rea- 
sonable faculty for sympathetic appreciation 
of truth and worth and beauty, under whatever 
new guises these may appear, are absolutely 
essential parts of a traveler's mental equipment 
if he is to come into anything like an intelligent 
understanding of the differing points of view 
and the various underlying motives of alien 
races and peoples. 

" As in America, so in Europe, the things 
most worth while cannot be had for the asking 
nor for money alone. Beauty exists only for 



A ROYAL ROAD 9 

those who are able to appreciate it; the charm 
of romance and legend thrills the hearts of 
those alone whose natures instinctively respond 
to the appeal of high and generous emotions; 
and the inspiration of historic and heroic asso- 
ciations is felt by none save those who are capa- 
ble of being lifted out of and above themselves 
into the Olympian atmosphere of the good and 
great of every age and people." 

Miss Ann Eliza did not exactly smile, but 
she did not trust herself to speak. Silently 
she raised her eyebrows just a shade, and 
looked inquiringly at her antagonist to see 
whether or not the gist of my remarks had gone 
home. The little epicurean seemed suddenly 
to have lost her taste for conversation, but be- 
ing hopelessly cornered by a dozen pair of in- 
quiring eyes, she finally broke an embarrassing 
silence and resolutely expressed her total lack 
of sympathy with either the spirit or the letter 
of my monologue by saying to Miss Ann 
Eliza : 

" I believe this is your first trip abroad. 
When you have been over a few more times, 
and all that seems so poetic and romantic now 
has become something of an old story, I imag- 
ine you will feel as I do, that you have got past 
the globe-trotting stage and are henceforth free 



io LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

to stay as long as you please at the places you 
like best, such as Cannes or St. Maurice for the 
winter; Paris for the autumn and spring; and 
Aix, Carlsbad, or Homburg for the summer. 
At all such resorts one meets charming, aristo- 
cratic people — polished men of the world who 
have had the leisure to cultivate the social 
amenities, who have taken the pains to learn 
how to make themselves agreeable to women, 
and who, in fact, have so planned their exist- 
ence as to make of living itself a fine art." 

Having delivered herself of this magisterial 
dictum, she arose, as if to say, " The audience 
is at an end," — but here a much betraveled 
Smith College professor, who up to this time 
had shown herself to be a first-class listener, 
headed off her purposed retreat by saying, 
" You have opened up a most interesting prob- 
lem, and some of your suggestions are much to 
the point. As you say, globe-trotting has no 
place in the post graduate course of travel. 
While a first view of Europe must necessarily 
be somewhat telescopic, or even kaleidoscopic, 
if, as is usually the case, one tries to cover an 
entire continent and some twenty odd centuries 
of history on a single tour; later views, if they 
are to be as full of spice, variety and enjoy- 
ment, must approach more nearly to the micro- 
scopic. How curious it is that although the 



A ROYAL ROAD n 

advantages of ' intensive farming ' have long 
been recognized, so few tourists seem to realize 
the extraordinary advantages to be derived 
from the intensive method when applied to 
travel. 

" The application of this method to market 
gardening has enabled the French peasant to get 
a comfortable living from a patch of ground 
that the average American farmer would dis- 
dain as a chicken yard. This same method, 
applied to a subject instead of a plot of ground, 
has led to that 4 specialization ' in science which 
is largely responsible for the recent increase 
in our accurate and detailed knowledge of the 
physical universe. It is this method, applied 
to the field of industrial activity, that has given 
rise to that ' division of labor ' which, together 
with the rapid progress of mechanical inven- 
tion, has brought about such an incredible in- 
crease during the past fifty years in the produc- 
tivity of human toil. And it is this method, 
when made use of by tourists and students of 
comparative art, politics, history, and present- 
day civilization, which is fast making of travel 
the only known ' royal road to knowledge.' 

" That is precisely what I was trying to say," 
chimed in the little Merry Widow nervously. 

" There may be a method of travel," I re- 
marked, " which is ' a royal road to knowledge/ 



12 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

but if so, it is * a straight and narrow path, and 
few there be that find it.' " 

11 Yes," continued the fair professor, " I fear 
there is a gulf fixed between frittering away 
one's time at such fashion infested resorts as 
Cannes, Aix, and St. Maurice, and taking a 
genuine post graduate course of travel at Paris, 
Rome, Florence, and other artistic and intel- 
lectual centers. Among other things, the grad- 
uate school of travel, like all other graduate 
schools, presupposes a working knowledge of at 
least one foreign language. It is extremely 
difficult, if not actually impossible, to penetrate 
beneath the outer crust of convention and ar- 
tificiality of a people unless one is able to speak 
and understand that people's language. To be 
sure, the common boast of British and Amer- 
ican tourists, that no Anglo-Saxon need encoun- 
ter serious practical difficulty in getting about 
Europe without the use of any but his mother- 
tongue, unquestionably is true. Hotels, rail- 
ways, casinos, the stock sights and the shops in 
the larger cities, all are at the disposition of 
anyone and everyone with gold in his purse. 
In the matter of procuring the creature com- 
forts while indulging in the regulation round 
of sightseeing, certain it is that ' money talks ' 
every known language. But if one tries to do 
original work in this interesting field, it does 



A ROYAL ROAD 13 

not take long to discover that the essential char- 
acter, the soul of a people, cannot be got at un- 
less one is able to boast at least a nodding ac- 
quaintance with the literature of that people 
as well as with the largely ephemeral but some- 
times intensely moving expressions of popular 
thought and feeling which pour forth from day 
to day through such channels as its press, its 
fiction, its pulpit, its theatre, and its parlia- 
mentary debates." 

" Yes, of course," ejaculated the little target 
for these remarks, " and yet, after all, are not 
the people one meets abroad more interesting 
than the things one sees? " 

"That depends upon the people," rejoined 
the professor. " While the fellow tourists one 
meets in hotel lobbies are frequently very nice 
in their way, yet association with them is a poor 
substitute for a real touching of elbows with 
the men and women who go with, and form an 
integral part of, the scenery and civilization we 
have come thousands of miles to see. For my 
own part, I am free to say that the finest mo- 
ments I have experienced in foreign lands have 
not been the ones spent gazing at the Coliseum, 
or staring at the Pyramids, or gaping at the 
gaudy sepulcher of Napoleon, but rather those 
rare moments of unaffected and intimate con- 
versation and companionship with unknown, 



i 4 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

and sometimes wholly unlettereid, chance ac- 
quaintances who, by their very naivete and un- 
guarded freedom of expression, unconsciously 
have revealed to me deep and hidden character- 
istics of different races and peoples." 

11 And these experiences," I observed, 
" would have been impossible but for your fa- 
miliarity with continental languages." 

11 Possibly," retorted little Madame Butter- 
fly, " but I find that all the people most worth 
meeting at Cannes and the other exclusive re- 
sorts speak English as well as they do their 
own tongues." 

" Yes ! " agreed the Professor. " The 
French Riviera offers exceptional facilities for 
social intercourse with foreigners who speak 
English. It is undoubtedly an ideal region in 
which to put in a month of motoring and golf, 
but to my mind even its wealth of natural 
beauty could hardly repay a normally healthy 
and intelligent person for a longer sojourn 
there. Every winter Nice, Cannes, and Monte 
Carlo are inundated by a promiscuous cosmo- 
politan influx of fanatical devotees of fashion, 
sport, luxury, and vice who dominate and dese- 
crate the entire countryside from Hyeres to San 
Remo. And as for Aix, Carlsbad, and the 
other ' cures ' that are frequented by the nobil- 
ity — during the ' season ' they are hot, stuffy, 
and swarming with the halt, the maimed, and 



A ROYAL ROAD 15 

the decrepit, and are in no imaginable way at- 
tractive, save to those who are physically ill or 
obsessed by social ambition." 

To prevent our little sparring match from 
going too far — and possibly ending with a 
knockout blow — I hastily rose at this point, 
and in my official capacity declared the bout " a 
draw." 

" It is patent," I said, " that Rome and Paris 
are richer in art treasures, ruins, and other stim- 
ulants of the aesthetic nature and the historic 
imagination than are Aix and Nice. But on 
the other hand, is it not demonstrated every 
day by thousands of our compatriots that if one 
has no stomach for that sort of thing, it is quite 
possible, even in these intellectual centers, to 
attain a state of surprisingly complete immunity 
from every cultural influence ? As a matter of 
fact, is not Europe like a vast library in which 
human nature automatically finds its level — 
certain types eagerly seizing upon the cheapest 
and most salacious authors, and others as in- 
stinctively seeking the companionship of the 
wisest, the wittiest, and the noblest of man- 
kind? " 

" However," I concluded, as the first gong 
sounded for dinner, " in a discussion of this na- 
ture, let us not forget that there is perhaps 
safety in the old Latin proverb — ' De gustibus 
non est disputandem.' " 



CHAPTER II 
PICKING UP A LANGUAGE 

On my first trip to Europe, like the Irish im- 
migrant who came to America expecting to find 
money lying about the streets, I confidently 
counted on being able to " pick up " one or two 
of the leading European languages at odd mo- 
ments, during a six months' tour of the Conti- 
nent. 

Before leaving America I provided myself 
with a copy of " French Verbs at a Glance," 
and I remember well with what intelligent care 
and naive satisfaction I selected from Baedek- 
er's list of Paris hotels a little French hostelry 
right in the heart of the Latin Quarter as my 
basis of operations. Having heard that most 
Americans make the mistake of going to the 
plutocratic section of the city, near the Avenue 
de l'Opera or the Arc de Triomphe, I deter- 
mined to settle down in close proximity to the 
University, l'ficole des Beaux Arts, the Cham- 
ber of Deputies and the great national museums 
and art galleries. Living among the French, I 
would absorb their language, and living among 

16 



PICKING UP A LANGUAGE 17 

poets, artists, students and statesmen, I would 
receive mental stimulus and inspiration from 
the highly charged psychic atmosphere of this 
hive of the " intellectuals " of France. Thus 
I reasoned and planned and prepared to make 
the most of my opportunities. But alas ! 
while my logic was sound enough, my knowl- 
edge of the game was sadly incomplete. 

At the very start, my attempt to talk business 
with the hotel proprietress in her own vernacu- 
lar ended in failure and confusion — the good 
woman finally being forced to come to my res- 
cue and explain her terms in that universal 
language which no self-respecting innkeeper, 
barber, waiter or bootblack in any part of the 
habitable globe can afford to be without — 
namely, English. But while I never mustered 
courage to attempt to speak French with my 
landlady again, I still had lively hopes of being 
able to " work " the waiter for a few francs' 
worth of French a day, and talked with him at 
every convenient opportunity, until to my hor- 
ror I discovered that my pronounced American 
accent was acquiring from this association a 
decided Dutch flavor. 

After nursing my disappointment for a few 
days, I finally realized that I should have to 
take up the study of French seriously and 
methodically. Accordingly I engaged the serv- 



1 8 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

ices of a gifted young woman for an hour a 
day, at " three francs fifty " per hour. The 
drivelling dreariness of these linguistic perform- 
ances was past belief. As they dragged on 
week after week, the lady and I became so 
bored with each other and our common store of 
stock phrases about the weather, our health and 
kindred topics, that we finally gave up all at- 
tempts at small talk and turned our undivided 
attention to the intricacies of irregular verbs, 
irrational grammatical constructions and irri- 
tating idioms. 

One of the worst features about being thus 
dependent upon a teacher who appears at stated 
intervals, is that the punctual mistress and the 
appointed hour so often arrive just at the mo- 
ment one is particularly anxious to be doing 
something else, in which case one must forego a 
pleasure or forfeit a lesson, along with the price 
of it. In either event, one is apt to feel a quite 
unreasonable resentment against the teacher 
and the language — likely enough blaming 
one's parents roundly, as for one thing or an- 
other people have been prone to blame them, 
from our " first parents" until our last — for 
not having had foreign languages poured into 
one during the plastic period of childhood. 

At this stage of my perplexity, I was told by 
a sympathizing friend, to whom I had confided 



PICKING UP A LANGUAGE 19 

the story of my thwarted efforts, that the easiest 
way to acquire the language was to get into a 
select " family pension " where only French 
was spoken. This suggestion sounded so prom- 
ising that I lost no time in putting it into execu- 
tion, and soon found myself in a highly 
recommended place where the Mistress, who 
was " diplomee," made a special point of cor- 
recting rigorously all the mistakes of her guests. 
Nearly all nationalities were represented at our 
frugal board, and while some of the ladies had 
a fairly good command of the language, none 
of them dared to launch out and say anything 
they had not previously planned and mentally 
rehearsed, for fear of being pounced upon by 
Madame and having their shortcomings held 
up mercilessly to the public gaze. Thus except 
for an occasional " well thought out and care- 
fully executed " sentence, uttered by one of the 
bolder spirits, our conversation was about as 
vivacious as that of a table of deaf mutes. 

I soon revolted at this intellectual tyranny, 
and one day at dinner politely indicated to 
Madame, that while her French was excellent 
and her food and drink most appetizing, her 
psychology was below par. 

" You have got all these people scared, 
bluffed, buffaloed," I urged. " What they need 
is not so much criticism as encouragement, and 



20 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

plenty of it. No error should be corrected un- 
til it has been made repeatedly. Most of our 
blunders we are painfully aware of as soon as 
they are out of our mouths and by practise we 
could learn to avoid them. But if you are con- 
stantly at hand suggesting fear, failure and 
public humiliation, however much we may learn 
of the science of grammar, we shall never learn 
the art of speaking French with spontaneity or 
facility." 

" None of my guests have ever objected to 
my methods before," she retorted, " and some 
of them have a splendid knowledge of the 
language." 

" Yes," I replied, " and their state of hope- 
less inability to make any effective use of what 
they know is precisely what I am most anxious 
to avoid." 

The next straw I grasped at was an adver- 
tisement of a " cultivated French family " which 
was willing to " take in one or two paying 
guests " who were desirous of perfecting them- 
selves in the French language. I promptly 
swallowed the bait, hook and all, and was sadly 
disconcerted on entering the dining-room to 
see that not merely " one or two " but seven 
" paying guests " had been received into the 
elastic and commodious bosom of this hospita- 
ble family. The prevailing tongue was a sort of 



PICKING UP A LANGUAGE 21 

mongrel, Anglo-Germanic-French, very like a 
cur dog I once saw, whose owner on being ques- 
tioned as to his breed, replied — " I don't yust 
know, but I tink he vas a spitz-bull-foundlin'." 

During my brief stay there I acquired the 
names of a few pieces of furniture and some 
dishes and saucepans, but as I was not gifted 
with the splendid patience and persistence of 
my Teutonic associates, I soon retired in bad 
order, leaving them in possession of the field. 

At this psychological moment, just as I was 
beginning to feel that I had sounded all the 
depths and shoals of discouragement, I chanced 
to fall in with a man who informed me that the 
problem of finding a royal road to a language — 
which had baffled the keenest minds of genera- 
tions — at last had been solved, by means of 
that mechanical marvel of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, the phonograph. 

" In this inexpensive little mechanism," he 
said, " which speaks all languages with equal 
ease, you have a faithful and untiring language 
teacher, at your beck and call day and night, 
always ready and willing to repeat any trouble- 
some word or phrase over and over again, un- 
til you have completely mastered whatever diffi- 
culties you may have in the way of accent or 
construction. Moreover, you need have no set 
hours for pursuing your studies. When you 



22 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

have nothing else to do, you have only to make 
yourself comfortable, put in the desired cylin- 
der, and amuse and instruct yourself to your 
heart's content." 

I rose to this glittering prospect like a trout 
to a fly, and on learning that my informant hap- 
pened to be the agent for the machine in ques- 
tion ordered one on the spot. The first day or 
two I devoted to the interesting task of learn- 
ing how to run it and trying all sorts of records, 
some in English as a relaxation, and one or 
two especially funny ones about some Irishmen 
— but as Kipling says, " that is another story." 
But the French ones were troublesome and 
dull. 

" It will become more and more fascinating," 
the salesman assured me, " as you come to un- 
derstand the language better, and do not have 
to stop so frequently to have phrases repeated 
or to consult your dictionary." 

Ah ! there I was baffled again by this will-o'- 
the-wisp of a language — always apparently so 
near at hand, but always just eluding my grasp ! 
However, I did not throw up the sponge without 
a struggle. I toiled conscientiously and dog- 
gedly on with my dictionary, grammar, talking 
machine, cylinders and explanatory pamphlets, 
until suddenly on the tenth day, all my energy 
and determination evaporated at the thought 



PICKING UP A LANGUAGE 23 

that by means of this extraordinary parapher- 
nalia I could pursue my French studies quite as 
effectively at Tombstone, Arizona, as in Paris ! 
At this juncture, my " horse sense " asserted 
itself, and I packed and shipped the whole outfit 
— phonograph, text books, records and all — 
to America. My long nightmare was over. I 
was at last wide awake to the absurdity and the 
pathos of my misdirected strenuosity. 

During this unhappy period of wabbling 
about in the wilderness, I made diligent inquiry, 
and discovered to my amazement, and I fear 
to my satisfaction, that something very like my 
own experience was the rule rather than the 
exception. I remember in particular the case 
of a charming young American girl, who had 
spent nearly four years in French-speaking coun- 
tries, without having acquired much more fa- 
cility with the language than I could boast. 
Her summers had been put in at Geneva and 
her winters at Mentone, with occasional side 
trips to Paris, Italy and elsewhere. 

" I am a member of the tennis clubs at 
Geneva and Mentone," she said, " but at both 
of them I meet generally either English, Ameri- 
cans or foreigners who speak our language. I 
attend the American churches where I meet 
more Americans, and most of the afternoon 
teas, as well as the balls to which I go, are 



24 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

frequented chiefly by the English-speaking 
tribes, or by Germans intent upon practising 
their English upon every defenseless person 
they meet. Thus you see my opportunities for 
learning French, except by means of tiresome 
lessons and hard digging, are practically nil." 

When at the end of six months I returned to 
America, it is true that I had picked up enough 
bootblack, barber-shop and bargain-counter 
French to enable me to make known all my 
most primitive wants and necessities. I had 
read the French newspapers with considerable 
profit, and some pleasure, but I had demon- 
strated thoroughly that if ever I was to get a 
real grip on the French language, I should have 
to adopt a more vigorous or a more intelligent 
plan of campaign. 



CHAPTER III 
LIVING AS EUROPEANS DO 

On my first visit to Europe, like most young 
and inexperienced cultivators, whether of the 
soil or the arts, I had made the mistake of try- 
ing to handle too large an area. Taking all 
Europe as my field of operations, I managed in 
a blundering sort of way to extract a certain 
amount of mental and emotional sustenance 
from the place as a whole, but I did not get a 
creditable yield per acre. A remark once made 
by the Right Honorable John Burns about the 
American people might have been applied to me 
at this period. " The American people," said 
the Honorable John, " is a very young colt in 
a very large field." 

However, before embarking on a second pil- 
grimage to this endlessly interesting grand- 
fatherland of our race, I took a junior partner 
into the firm, and aided and abetted by her, 
formulated a " foreign policy " which proved 
successful from the very start. Instead of 
traveling from one tourist hotel to another, our 

25 



26 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

plan was to take quarters among the natives 
wherever we went, in order to live as nearly as 
possible the normal life of the country and to 
associate on friendly terms with all sorts and 
conditions of its people. 

At Paris we got a valuable cue from a shrewd 
Yankee who, wishing to place his daughter in 
a boarding-school where she would be associ- 
ated exclusively with French children, labori- 
ously went the rounds of the British and Amer- 
ican consuls, pastors, and banks, making care- 
ful note of the schools they recommended and 
promptly eliminating all such from his list of 
eligibles, on the grounds that presumably they 
already had an established Anglo-Saxon clien- 
tele. 

In similar fashion, at Mentone, where we 
stopped first, the test question we put to the 
proprietors of the places that had been recom- 
mended was whether they had any pres- 
ent or prospective English or American guests. 
On being beamingly assured that the house was, 
or soon expected to be, full of them, we ex- 
plained that this was precisely what we did not 
want, and shaking the dust of that establish- 
ment from our feet, continued our search for a 
pure and unadulterated French atmosphere. 
This at last we found — thanks to the French 
Protestant pastor, in a little " bourgeois pen- 



LIVING AS EUROPEANS DO 27 

sion " where a number of French merchants, 
government employees, and some retired Pa- 
risian families ate, drank, argued and made 
merry for an incredibly drawn-out lunch hour 
and for twice as long at dinner time. In a 
nearby apartment house we secured rooms 
flooded with sunshine, looking out on the moun- 
tains and the sea. 

Our board and lodging, together with such 
" extras " as eggs and fruit with our breakfast, 
mineral waters and afternoon tea, a private sit- 
ting-room and rousing wood fires, all of which 
are costly luxuries at hotels, we had at less than 
the price of ordinary cramped hotel accommo- 
dations. Moreover, it would be hard to esti- 
mate the value of constantly hearing and speak- 
ing French — an extra which was a luxury that 
none of the pretentious tourist " palaces " 
swarming with Anglo-Saxon and German guests 
could have provided at any price. 

As one who has mastered the rudiments of 
swimming in the buoyant brine of the Great 
Salt Lake is apt, on first trying his fortunes in 
fresher waters, to go struggling and strangling 
to the bottom, so we as promptly came to grief 
on this our first opportunity for putting into 
workaday practice the college French which 
had proved so deceptively adequate to the ex- 
igencies of life in America. In a comparatively 



28 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

short time, however, thanks to the unwearied 
patience and zest with which the entire circle at 
our pension devoted themselves to the hospita- 
ble and patriotic task of initiating us into the 
mysteries of their " incomparable language," 
we soon were able to hold our heads above 
water, and a little later to strike out boldly for 
ourselves in the tempestuous waves of conver- 
sation that raged about us. 

There were frequent political discussions 
between Bonapartists and republicans, nation- 
alists and socialists, the excitement of debate 
often rising to a white heat — when suddenly 
the advent of another course would switch the 
tide of talk to religion, whereupon the battle 
would rage no less fiercely between Protestants, 
Catholics and Free Thinkers, until with the ar- 
rival of dessert all hands would settle down to 
the delicate and delectable task of deciding 
which they hated most thoroughly, the English 
or the Germans. 

We divided our spare time between such in- 
door distractions as were offered by the thea- 
tres and operas at Mentone, Monte Carlo, and 
Nice, and the outdoor attractions which a prod- 
igal nature has lavished on these coasts. Men- 
tone, set midway between the Alps and the 
Mediterranean, seems like a woman wooed by 
two lovers and uncertain which to choose, — 



LIVING AS EUROPEANS DO 29 

the mountains bending down from their heights 
to caress her, or the sea creeping close to her 
side, content only to touch the hem of her gar- 
ment and lie always at her feet. At no other 
resort in this region are there so many interest- 
ing walks and mountain climbs or such a va- 
riety of motor trips over unrivalled roads that 
present to view an ever-changing panorama of 
hillsides and valleys covered with a luxuriant 
tropical vegetation, yet hemmed in by ranges 
of snow-capped peaks rising out of the distance 
like ghosts of winter that threaten but dare not 
approach. 

Often our excursions led us through quaint 
little stone villages, dirty, cold and crumbling, 
which, perched here and there on desolate 
mountain crags, and swarming with wretched 
peasants, still call to mind the days when the 
Saracens ravaged these coasts and all the fisher- 
men and country folk of the region fled for 
their lives to these hill towns, each of which was 
fortified with an impregnable chateau. 

If in some respects the French are most eco- 
nomical, they are at least spendthrifts in the 
matter of road-building. Along these " Coasts 
of Azure " one frequently has the choice be- 
tween three attractive routes — the first so near 
the sea as to be almost lapped by its waves, the 
second higher up among the hills, and the last 



3 o LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

a splendid national highway a thousand feet 
sheer in the air, with military branches leading 
to fortified mountain tops and numerous de- 
scending roads on either side encircling the 
mountains in wonderful sweeping spirals like 
broad white ribbons, tying together the various 
features of the landscape in a colossal Napole- 
onic knot. 

On our last night at Mentone, after three 
months of rare good comradeship, we were 
feted at the pension in a typically French way. 
A special menu had been prepared for the occa- 
sion, as well as a program consisting of mono- 
logues, dialogues, songs and speeches in which 
most of the guests took part, and at the psycho- 
logical moment a magnificent basket of flowers 
was presented, while our health was pledged in 
sparkling champagne, which nevertheless was 
not as sparkling as the toasts to which it was 
drunk. This climatic manifestation of friend- 
ship on the part of such comparative strangers 
might have seemed a trifle excessive but for 
the fact that from the moment they first had 
welcomed us so whole-heartedly into their gay 
little bohemian circle until this, the grand finale 
of the last act, their unfailing courtesy and tact- 
ful efforts to aid us in every imaginable way 
had expressed more eloquently than words the 
disinterested interest and genuine good-will 



LIVING AS EUROPEANS DO 31 

which they felt, and of which, in characteristic 
French fashion, they were wholly unashamed. 

Our next long stay was at Venice, where it 
was our good fortune to secure rooms in a house 
on the Grand Canal which had been enthusi- 
astically recommended by some artist friends 
as the favorite Venetian stopping-place for a 
number of well-known writers, artists, and 
other " intellectuals," who preferred the free- 
dom and privacy of quiet lodgings a V Anglais e 
to the noisy confusion and hodge-podge gre- 
gariousness of life in " grand " hotels. 

The proprietress of this establishment, as ec- 
centric a landlady as we encountered in all our 
wanderings, was on the whole the most interest- 
ing human document we found in Venice. Un- 
der her ancient roof one might feel as safe as in 
one's own home from any danger of contract- 
ing contagious diseases, since invalids of all 
shades and varieties were her particular hor- 
ror. One afternoon I overheard an amusing 
conversation between her and an American 
woman who had come to engage rooms. The 
final arrangements had been made and the lady 
was to take possession that afternoon. In a 
burst of enthusiasm which she felt she could 
afford after the bargain was struck, and partly, 
perhaps, for practice in her Italian, which 
needed exercising, she said, " My husband will 



32 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

enjoy these rooms so much; he is not well and 
must have quiet." 

Fatal phrase! At the mention of a sick 
husband Madame scented danger from afar 
and instantly assumed a defensive attitude. In 
courteous and circuitous, but at the same time 
emphatic and conclusive, Italian she gave the 
lady to understand that it was not within her 
power to accept a sick lodger. In vain did the 
woman protest that her husband was not really 
ill, only suffering from that American malady, 
nervous prostration, which no Italian ever 
could catch if he tried. Madame's will was a 
compound of cast-iron and Gibraltar rock, 
against which argument and entreaty alike beat 
in vain, and in the end the American with one 
long lingering look at the beautiful rooms and 
another at Madame, more eloquent than all 
her Italian, was obliged to step into the gondola 
and return to her nervous husband, the innocent 
cause of their common calamity. 

The only time our chances of remaining here 
were endangered was on the occasion of my 
wife's arrival, for the sixth time during a 
period of as many days, an hour late for lunch- 
eon. I had been scenting trouble for three or 
four days, but rightly prognosticated that if 
things came to a contest, Madame Machiavelli 
would not last two rounds. The bout, from 



LIVING AS EUROPEANS DO 33 

my wife's description of it to some friends 
that evening, must have been an amusing 
one. 

" From a distance," she said, " I sighted 
Madame standing on the doorstep, gesticulat- 
ing vehemently and intimating as the gondola 
came within ear-trumpet shot that her patience 
was at an end, likewise the lunch, and that all 
that remained for me was to mend my ways or 
forfeit my meals along with our rooms. I could 
but recognize the righteousness of her indigna- 
tion and the slender grounds for my defence, 
but what little ground I had, I ' stood ' to the 
best of my ability. Recalling the intense civic 
pride of the Venetians, which is as susceptible 
to praise as is the vanity of most people to per- 
sonal flattery, I inquired in an injured tone how 
one could possibly be expected to remember 
mealtime in St. Mark's, or give a thought to 
one's luncheon in the Academy. She seemed 
considerably mollified by this view, and when I 
further explained that there never was so lovely 
a city, nor one so rich in treasures as Venice, 
adding grandiloquently that one may eat else- 
where, but in Venice one must adore, the last 
vestige of her anger was completely melted by 
the warmth of my enthusiasm, and all my sins 
against herself were wiped out by my love for 
her city. Quietly adding some extra delicacies 



34 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

to my luncheon in token of completest pardon, 
she stood by while I ate and asked in a pleased 
way, ' La Signora, who has seen so much, really 
finds Venezia piu bella (more beautiful) than 
all the other cities ? ' Now this was a search- 
ing question, as my love for Florence admits of 
no rivals, but it is not agreeable to hurt peo- 
ple's feelings, nor to omit one's luncheon, even 
in Venice, so I swore solemnly with my hand 
on my heart, in the region of my stomach, that 
' Venezia e la piu bella di tutte ' (Venice is the 
most beautiful of all) . And really this was no 
treason, for you know I have certain purely 
personal reasons for acknowledging the su- 
premacy of Venice in sheer magic and witchery 
and fairy spell." 

At Florence, the next city on our program, 
we determined if possible to find a family in 
which we could have practice in both French 
and Italian. The French Consul, to whom we 
explained the combination sought — equal fa- 
cilities for two languages, commodious quar- 
ters, plenty of creature comforts, tranquillity 
for work, entire immunity from English, and 
the atmosphere of a cultivated home — re- 
marked that we evidently were laboring under 
some misapprehension, as this was Florence, 
not Paradise. However, we refused to be dis- 
couraged, and in the end Providence again 



LIVING AS EUROPEANS DO 35 

came to our rescue through what we had come 
to regard as its regularly ordained channel for 
help in such emergencies, — namely, the French 
Protestant church. On applying to the pastor, 
we were told of a member of his congregation, 
a French professor with a Florentine wife, 
who lived in a little villa on the way to Fiesole 
and occasionally let a suite of three rooms with 
a balcony overhanging a typical Italian garden 
and overlooking the distant Cathedral and 
Campanile. We lost no time in following up 
this latest clue, — which, if it did not lead to 
Paradise, seemed to point the way to some- 
thing very like it, — and found to our delight, 
once we had passed the somewhat elaborate 
civil service examination to which we were sub- 
jected by the cautious professor and were tri- 
umphantly installed in our new quarters, that 
the reality was quite up to specifications. 

The professor, who spoke Italian and 
French equally well, regaled us with an appar- 
ently inexhaustible fund of information about 
modern Italian life, while the Signora never 
tired of telling picturesque incidents of her girl- 
hood and early womanhood under the old Flor- 
entine regime. In their drawing-room we met 
many of their friends, while we went pi- 
ously every Sunday to the little Swiss church 
where we heard the soundest doctrine and the 



36 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

purest French — a happy combination for our 
souls and our pronunciation. 

Perhaps the most typically Tuscan character 
with whom we came into familiar contact in 
Florence was Giulietta, the little maid, as naive 
as an elf and as lovely as one of Raphael's 
Madonnas, who ran our errands, polished our 
boots, and did the daily marketing for the villa. 
One afternoon, as we were watching a funeral 
procession, she sighed softly, " Death and birth 
are the companions of all of us, messengers 
that are never idle!" When asked by my 
wife who had put that idea into her head, she 
looked up with a charming humility that was 
ready to recant any article of faith of her own 
forging at a word of dissent from the lady 
from beyond the seas who must needs know 
all, and replied, "No one, Signora; I thought 
it myself; perhaps it is not so! " 

Although in Florence wonderful hats of Tus- 
can straw — "plaited gold of God's harvest" 
— can be bought out of a barrel for a song on 
market days, there seems to be an unwritten 
law among the proud Florentines that servants 
and peasants shall abstain from all indulgence 
in millinery. So on Sundays and holidays Giu- 
lietta used to tie up her black curls in a ban- 
danna and spend the whole afternoon wander- 
ing through the galleries of the Uffizi or Pitti, 



LIVING AS EUROPEANS DO 37 

gazing rapturously at the pictures and seeming 
to extract endless delight from these ancient 
masterpieces. I must confess it was rather a 
shock to me to discover that she was as ignorant 
of Raphael's identity as she was of her alphabet 
and seemingly had never even heard of Dante. 
However, God had given her a lovely face and 
a poetic nature — and ancestors at least who 
" knew their Dante " and had discussed the out- 
come of his passion for Beatrice on their door- 
steps; men who had sided for or against Gali- 
leo; had been enthusiastic partisans of Leo- 
nardo or of his great competitor in the affair of 
the Pizan cartoons; had helped Michael An- 
gelo defend the walls of Florence, or hewn the 
stones for Giotto's Campanile, and followed 
Cimabue's Madonna " rejoicing through the 
streets." Is it any wonder that the humblest 
descendant of such a race should have a haunt- 
ing love of beauty, or that some of the very 
beggars in Florence should look like poets un- 
der their rags? 

On several occasions, in Italy and elsewhere, 
first-class native hotels have proved much more 
to our taste than the huge cosmopolitan cara- 
vansaries which of recent years have sprung up 
all over the Continent in response to the seem- 
ingly inexhaustible demand on the part of cer- 
tain tourists for hotel accommodations em- 



3 8 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

bodying the maximum of luxury and the mini- 
mum of refinement. 

For example, on leaving Florence for a few 
weeks' " cure " at a well-known Italian water- 
ing-place, we installed ourselves in the com- 
paratively modest hostelry which for years had 
been the recognized rendezvous for the higher 
class Italian, French, and South American hab- 
itues of the place, hoping thus to eke out a pre- 
carious linguistic existence by picking up what- 
ever crumbs of conversation might fall to our 
lot. The table was deliciously Italian and the 
social life which we shared with an interesting 
variety of fellow guests was whole-heartedly 
and hilariously Latin; while the easy intellect- 
ual versatility of our new-found friends, to- 
gether with their rich poetic powers of expres- 
sion and vivid flashes of insight, threw interest- 
ing sidelights on French and Italian character. 

On going to Switzerland for the summer, we 
were rather chagrined to discover that the more 
desirable hotels in the most desirable spots in 
the High Alps had long since been in the serene 
possession of the migratory hosts of Pan 
Anglo-Saxondom. However, as a means of 
living in this already sufficiently familiar world 
without being too much of it, we finally hit upon 
the expedient of putting ourselves behind the 
protecting petticoats of a French companion, 



LIVING AS EUROPEANS DO 39 

and by arranging for daily readings aloud as 
well as conversation at meal times and during 
frequent walks and excursions, found it quite 
possible to enjoy all the creature comforts and 
at the same time to absorb almost without ef- 
fort a goodly dose each day of the desired lan- 
guage and its literature. 

In this way we accomplished far more by 
merely utilizing that by-product of our time 
known as our " spare moments " than we for- 
merly had done by devoting hours of hard la- 
bor to set lessons. With a walking dictionary, 
self-explanatory grammar, tutor of literature 
and living fountain of .conversation all com- 
bined in one person, and that paragon always 
at one's beck and call, the study of French was 
transformed from an intellectual mountain 
climb to a species of mental toboggan slide. 

After our summer in the Alps we settled 
down for the autumn at Geneva in the family 
of a retired pastor who had a beautiful home 
with large grounds in the choicest residence 
quarter of the city. Our host and hostess were 
related to a number of interesting people, 
among them the famous old " Christian Philos- 
opher " of Geneva, M. Ernest Naville, 1 known 
and loved throughout Europe for his scholar- 
ship, literary charm, and brilliant personality, 

1 Recently dead at the age of 92. 



4 o LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

and as they had a delightful family of grown- 
up sons and daughters, our stay with them 
seemed like a long drawn out visit at a big 
house-party. 

Once fairly launched in a sea of French ac- 
quaintances, we found it comparatively easy 
to make our way from one port to another by 
the aid of friendly pilots in time of need. 
When we left Switzerland the pleasant rela- 
tions established with our little coterie of 
Genevan friends proved an open sesame to an 
equally delightful circle in Paris. Armed with 
letters from their Swiss friends and relatives, 
we persuaded an interesting Parisian and his 
wife to take us, as an experiment, into their 
home. The husband, a publisher by profes- 
sion and a scholar by instinct, had a splendid 
private library and a detailed and discriminat- 
ing knowledge of books, both of which he 
placed at our disposal; while his wife, a grad- 
uate of the Sorbonne, where several of her rel- 
atives occupied chairs, was herself a character- 
istic representative of a family which for over 
a hundred years has been intellectually the 
most influential Protestant family in France. 

In their apartment in the Latin quarter, with 
its atmosphere of good books, rare old prints, 
and rarer good company, we passed during the 
winter and spring perhaps the most keenly inter- 



LIVING AS EUROPEANS DO 41 

esting portion of our sojourn abroad. Hav- 
ing ample time to our credit, we were able to 
exorcise the demons of hurry, ' agitation, and 
intellectual avariciousness, and as calmly to 
plan our weekly routine of distraction and stud- 
ies as though the various phases of the many- 
sided pulsing life of the French capital were so 
many delightful entertainments or university 
courses, to be taken advantage of by the for- 
tunate strangers within her gates. 

We put in many agreeable afternoons bur- 
rowing among the book stalls on the quays 
along the Seine for bargains in old editions, or 
prowling around the narrow streets of the older 
quarters of the city among its ancient land- 
marks. Often, on our way home from such 
excursions into the past, we stopped in to hear 
the latest intellectual sensation at the Sorbonne 
or some impassioned political discussion at the 
Chamber of Deputies by way of bringing the 
story of the nation up to date, and getting a 
glimpse of French history in the making. Oc- 
casionally, caught by some mighty wave of pop- 
ular sentiment which lifted us above this at- 
mosphere of academic calm and domestic tran- 
quillity into the highly charged upper air of 
idealistic or patriotic passion, we would rush 
across the city to participate in one of those 
monster demonstrations which the excitable 



42 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

Parisians are continually organizing to express 
their pent-up emotions on subjects of local, 
national, or world-wide significance. 

The knowledge of the French language and 
of the Latin psychology which we had gained 
during our apprenticeship at Mentone, Flor- 
ence, Geneva, and the other places along the 
road that led at last to Paris, gradually had pre- 
pared us for this more ambitious venture into 
the heart of French national life. Moreover, 
by devoting the greater part of our time and at- 
tention to the normal activities and higher inter- 
ests of the city, as distinguished from its friv- 
olous life of fashion or the vicious life of its 
underworld, we gradually began to catch some- 
thing of the Parisian point of view. As a re- 
sult we came to realize that France could not 
continue to hold her brilliant and long-estab- 
lished place in the intellectual world, and that 
the serious business of Paris and the Provinces 
could not be carried on, if Frenchmen were as 
superficial, as sensual, and as unstable as we, 
in common with the majority of foreigners who 
only know their surface life of fever and fer- 
ment, pleasure-seeking and dissipation, had for- 
merly supposed them to be. 

As our prejudices, preconceived notions, and 
natural limitations of insight slowly disap- 
peared, it became increasingly apparent that as 



LIVING AS EUROPEANS DO 43 

" the cure for democracy is more democracy, " 
so the cure for the smug, snap judgments of the 
Anglo-Saxon world as to the hopeless moral 
and material decadence of the Latin races is to 
be found in a more detailed, accurate, and sym- 
pathetic knowledge of the normal everyday life 
of the normal everyday people of the great 
Latin nations. 



CHAPTER IV 
THE BEST SIDE OF PARIS 

In Paris the " usual thing " for tourists is a 
half-day at the Louvre gazing at masterpieces 
of painting and sculpture; five minutes at Na- 
poleon's tomb ; a quarter of an hour at the Ca- 
thedral of Notre Dame; a like prodigality of 
time at the gallery of the Luxembourg and 
other stock " sights; " then off the women go 
to the Bon Marche and rival establishments 
to revel in bargains, and the men to the cafes, 
the theatres, the boulevards, the Moulin Rouge, 
and heaven knows where else, to acquire that 
polish which is warranted to transform a man 
into " a man of the world." 

What a travesty on travel! What bound- 
less possibilities of culture and enjoyment are 
thus blindly neglected! If the thousands who 
yearly go on pilgrimages across the water to 
their shrines of fashion, aesthetic affectation, 
and indecency, would but open their eyes to the 
myriad really interesting objects to be seen on 
every side, they would come back with mind 
and heart full, not of ignorant servile idolatry 

44 



THE BEST SIDE OF PARIS 45 

of foreign luxury and manners, but of .sugges- 
tions for improving our own incomparable 
land. 

The theatrical attractions of Paris are un- 
rivalled and practically unlimited. For while 
Sarah Bernhardt, Coquelin, Rejane, and Jane 
Hading can be seen in England, America, and 
indeed all over the world, only in Paris can be 
enjoyed the Theatre Frangais and the Odeon, 
the two great national government-supported 
theatres of France, where one can revel in the 
study of French literature, ancient and modern, 
as interpreted by the world's most finished act- 
ors and actresses. At the Frangais every char- 
acter, even to that of the meanest servant, 
is taken by one of the greatest artists of 
France, and at the Odeon during the winter 
months " classical matinees " are given for the 
presentation of masterpieces, each of which is 
preceded by a lecture on the play and its author 
by some celebrated critic. In no other coun- 
try in the world is the study of literature thus 
illumined and made delightful by the combined 
genius of lecturer and actor. 

Finally, as a supplement to the unrivalled 
feast of reason and flow of French which is so 
continuously offered at the better-class theatres, 
delightful courses of lectures are to be had at 
the University and other centers of learning on 



46 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

every phase and epoch of French literature, 
as well as on nearly every other conceivable 
subject. As a matter of fact, if in Paris one 
starts out with a view to partaking of all the 
intellectual and aesthetic " delicacies of the sea- 
son," one is destined to a speedy disillusion- 
ment as to the extent of one's own capacity for 
receiving impressions, or as to the extent and 
variety of the mental and emotional provender 
that is prepared each week for a discriminating 
Parisian public. Among the more recently es- 
tablished teaching centers, one of the least fa- 
tiguing and most entertaining is the Universite 
des Annales, much frequented by the bean 
monde. There every day during term time 
specialists on Greek art and philosophy, Roman 
history, French literature, radium, pernicious 
microbes, or what not, hold forth after the in- 
imitable fashion of the French conferencier, 
and not infrequently some of the " Immortals 
for Life " are persuaded to descend from the 
Olympian heights of the Academy for an hour's 
dissertation, illustrated by songs, recitations, or 
dances, by artists from the Opera Comique or 
the Francais. 

To the student of French life and social con- 
ditions, perhaps the most unique and interest- 
ing theatre in Paris is the Theatre Antoine, a 
strictly nineteenth century product. M. An- 



THE BEST SIDE OF PARIS 47 

toine, the creator, manager and star — or 
rather sun — of this theatre began life as an 
employee of a gas company. Without any 
previous training or experience he started the 
" Free Theatre," which he conducted according 
to his own original and unheard-of ideas. 
He was strongly realistic, often brutally so, 
taking as his motto " Truth at any cost ! " some- 
times even going so far as to turn his back 
to the audience during whole acts. He simpli- 
fied stage settings, entirely subordinating 
beauty and scenic effect to force and realism, 
and taught his own actors and actresses, many 
of whom like himself had had no previous 
professional training. In addition to this he 
staged a class of plays never before seen in 
France — plays taken from Zola, Tolstoy, 
Turgenef, and plays of Ibsen, Hauptmann, 
Sudermann, Bjornson, and of such modern 
French writers as Bernstein and Brieux, who 
are filled with the new sociological spirit of the 
age. Every one except a handful of personal 
friends saw failure written all over the enter- 
prise; but by the sheer force of genius he scored 
a remarkable theatrical success which has rev- 
olutionized the methods and aims of the 
French theatre, and made of it a powerful 
civilizing force. He thus has given a vital im- 
pulse to modern serious sociological literature 



48 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

and has brought powerfully before the minds 
and consciences of the great theatre-going pub- 
lic new and higher social ideals, which are help- 
ing to mould the future of France. 

As a crowning recognition of his success, 
the French Government has placed M. Antoine 
at the head of the Odeon Theatre, where he 
is continuing his constructive work under more 
favorable auspices than ever before. 

The French theatre, however, is but one of 
the many manifestations of that all-pervasive 
aesthetic spirit which makes art the most dis- 
tinctive feature of French life. The Ecole des 
Beaux Arts has long been rated as first among 
the world's art schools. The Louvre, which' 
gives courses of study specially designed to in- 
terpret its infinitely rich and varied art col- 
lections, public lectures of a more popular na- 
ture, and a four years' course for students pre- 
paring to fill positions as curators, librarians, 
and traveling collectors for museums, is the 
most instructive as it is the greatest single art 
gallery in the world. The Luxembourg is a 
superb museum of contemporary painting and 
sculpture, while two salons each spring give to 
the world the best of the year's product of the 
studios of Paris. And in addition to all this 
there are numerous smaller galleries and pub- 
lic buildings, such as the Pantheon and Hotel 



THE BEST SIDE OF PARIS 49 

de Ville, which contain some of the most splen- 
did creations of the modern French artistic 
imagination. 

I was reared with a Puritanic, Tolstoyan 
inclination to regard most art as of the devil, 
— as something effeminate and enervating, — 
but when I came to see that art is power, I be- 
gan to respect it. Discovering in the course 
of my sociological investigations that American 
manufacturers, while holding their own against 
English and German competitors, were making 
little or no headway in certain lines of in- 
dustry against the French because of the 
superior artistic quality of French work, I 
was forced to admit the existence of an im- 
portant and hitherto unrecognized factor in the 
problem. Manifestly, until our designers and 
workmen can rival the rare and beautiful ef- 
fects which the French produce, we can never 
hope to compete with them in the markets of 
the world. Unquestionably, art should have a 
place, not only in public museums and galleries 
and in the drawing-rooms of the rich, but in 
the factory, on the farm and in the kitchen, for 
only as the artistic spirit permeates and beauti- 
fies all human products and all human life, is 
it performing its true function. 

Without doubt an instinct for the beautiful 
is to be found in the French blood. The aver- 



50 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

age shop girl is a born milliner and gets more 
artistic effect from the expenditure of a few 
francs than an American is apt to get at the 
cost of several times as many dollars. But 
this characteristic is only partly temperamental; 
to a very considerable extent it is a result of 
the aesthetically stimulating influence of French 
life and of a systematic artistic education. The 
French child learns to draw before he learns to 
write, and this training extends throughout 
his entire school life. For the benefit of ap- 
prentices and adults, evening classes in geo- 
metric and technical drawing, machine and ar- 
chitectural design, drawing from flowers, casts, 
and the nude, as well as classes in modeling and 
sculpture, are given in every ward in Paris. 
More advanced courses are given in the Munici- 
pal School of Decorative Art, while the govern- 
ment factories of Gobelin tapestries and of 
Sevres ware have superb art schools connected 
with them. Moreover, hardly any of the 
great provincial French towns is without its 
surprisingly rich art gallery and its own schools 
for general and applied art. 

As a supplement to a personal investigation 
of this and other similar subjects, I found the 
" Musee Social " an invaluable institution. It 
was founded and heavily endowed by the Comte 
de Chambrun " for the purpose of supplying 



THE BEST SIDE OF PARIS 51 

reliable information concerning any institution 
which really succeeds in bettering the material 
or moral conditions of the working classes." 
It is not a teaching body like the London 
School of Economics, but it commissions stu- 
dents and writers in different parts of the world 
to carry on researches concerning important 
sociological problems. A monthly review is 
issued as well as a series of booklets embody- 
ing the results of these studies. A course of 
popular lectures is given each winter in the hall 
of the Musee, and a sociological library of 16,- 
000 volumes, with reading-rooms supplied 
with the leading newspapers and magazines of 
the world, is free to all. This is by no means 
an ideal institution. It is open to criticism for 
sins both of omission and commission, but at 
least it has made a splendid beginning. A 
more virile, scholarly, and constructive insti- 
tution of the sort will one day be established 
in our country to epitomize and popularize, 
supplement and stimulate the work of our pres- 
ent Bureau of Labor Statistics. When all the 
other nations have followed suit, another great 
step in the direction of civilization will have 
been taken, for statecraft at last will have 
made a start toward the attainment of a 
condition of at least semi-intelligence. A real 
science of politics will then be possible, inter- 



52 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

national in its scope, scholarly in its methods, 
and lofty in its ideals. 

Several of our most interesting evenings in 
Paris were spent at the " popular universities ' 
where we heard lectures by Professor Charles 
Gide, the well-known economist, and Anatole 
France, the greatest living French man of let- 
ters. The French " conference " is a species 
of lecture which is entirely unique in its artistic 
beauty, subtile humor and sparkling wit. To 
my mind it is in some ways a higher form of 
art than the theatre. 

The " popular university " movement is one 
of the most remarkable manifestations yet seen 
of the spirit of the twentieth century. At its 
different centers philosophy, economics, liter- 
ature, natural science, hygiene, music, and art 
are taught to classes of grimy workingmen by 
the greatest artists, writers, and scholars of 
France. At bottom it is a religious movement, 
for scientific French agnosticism, in endeavor- 
ing to become constructive, is trying to develop 
a religion in the broad, humanitarian sense of 
that term. It has discovered that the cold 
truth of science is powerless except as warmed 
into life by the flame of a passionate altruism; 
that the scientific spirit and the Christ spirit 
are fundamentally and eternally necessary each 
to the other. The movement has spread very 



THE BEST SIDE OF PARIS 53 

rapidly, having a center in every ward in Paris 
and its environs, and not a few here and there 
in the provinces. It is an outcome of a recog- 
nition by the " intellectuals," the brains of 
France, that unless they understand and are 
understood by the brawn and sinew of the 
nation, they are abnormal, impractical and im- 
potent; and of a recognition by the working- 
men that intelligence, when not prostituted to 
plutocratic, aristocratic, or clerical influences, 
is their best friend and co-worker in the great 
task of working out solutions for the grinding 
problems of civilization. A solidarity of in- 
terests is seen to extend through all classes of 
society except the predatory and parasitic ones. 
This movement, like much that is best in 
French life today, was an outcome of the Drey- 
fus affair. This moral crisis through which 
France passed, and passed successfully, was of 
measureless value to the country. The strug- 
gle was so intense and the excitement rose to 
such a white heat that French thought and life 
were reduced to a state of chemical solution 
and when they re-crystallized, new forms, new 
alignments appeared, and a new and purified na- 
tion emerged. Of this transformation French 
politics furnished one of the most striking ex- 
amples. Before the " affair," French political 
parties were a hopeless jumble of Progressiv- 



54 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

ists, Radicals, Radical Socialists, Revolutionary 
Socialists, plain and uncompromising Socialists, 
Allemanists, Guesdists, Blanquists, National- 
ists, Anti-Semites, Rallies, Revisionists, Royal- 
ists, Bonapartists, Clericalists and Independ- 
ents. From this chaos emerged two confedera- 
tions or groups. On one side were to be found 
those who believed in defending the free insti- 
tutions which their fathers had died to found, 
and who believed in further progress. This 
included most of the Socialists and Radicals as 
well as those whom we would call the Conserva- 
tives. On the other side were the Bonapartists 
and Royalists, striving to overthrow religious 
freedom and non-sectarian education, and most 
of the " malefactors of great wealth," fighting 
all progress blindly on general principles. 

I had the privilege of watching the first des- 
perate battle between these rival hosts. It was 
the fiercest political contest that France had 
seen since the birth-throes of the present Re- 
public. Although the reactionaries had an un- 
limited " slush fund," and bought every pur- 
chasable vote, prostituted every mercenary 
newspaper or magazine, and enlisted the serv- 
ices of every unprincipled spell-binder, they 
were so thoroughly beaten that friends of prog- 
ress all over the world lifted up their voices in 
thanksgiving. It was one of the most splendid 



THE BEST SIDE OF PARIS 55 

victories for reform that the modern world had 
seen. 

Some such political realignment is inevitable 
in America in the near future. Its coming can- 
not be materially hastened by anxiously zealous 
" reformers "; it cannot be stayed for long by 
all the predatory powers. Suddenly some day, 
a great and vital issue will arise, dwarfing into 
insignificance all the paltry interests and preju- 
dices of existing parties, " machines " and polit- 
ical cliques. In a night the old partisan bonds 
will be loosed. Naturally and irresistibly the 
voters will range themselves anew into two " far 
flung battle lines," and the leaders who cannot 
adjust their creeds and ambitions to the changed 
conditions will be heedlessly brushed aside and 
forgotten. 

When the issue is thus finally joined, when 
the genuine progressives of all parties stand 
shoulder to shoulder against the forces of reac- 
tion and the battle is at last fairly on, there can 
be but one outcome. The day of a real and 
triumphant American democracy will have 
dawned. 



CHAPTER V 

JEAN JAURES, PROPHET OF 
SOCIAL REDEMPTION * 

To the present generation of Frenchmen, 
Jean Jaures, the inspiring leader of the French 
Parliamentary Socialists, has become a sort of 
national institution like the Opera or Theatre 
Frangais. All classes of Frenchmen, even 
those who are most bitterly opposed to his prin- 
ciples, recognize him as constituting one of the 
glories of the present epoch. This attitude re- 
minds one of that of many of their contempora- 
ries towards the saints of the Middle Ages. 
While comparatively few people paid any seri- 
ous attention to the doctrines of poverty, chas- 
tity, and unselfish devotion of St. Francis or St. 
Dominic, even the richest, the most sensual and 
selfish of their fellow citizens were inordinately 
proud of having a genuine saint in their midst. 

In pleasure-loving Paris M. Jaures lives as 
simply as a Charles Wagner and as strenuously 
as a Roosevelt. As a matter of fact, he is 
more passionately, self-sacrificingly devoted to 

1 Assassinated at Paris, July 31, 1914. 

56 



JEAN JAURES 57 

his ideals than are most of the professional re- 
ligious zealots of today, while he does a greater 
amount of exhausting intellectual labor than 
any other man in French public life. 

The very diversity of his gifts has caused 
many, even among his friends and admirers, to 
misunderstand the real secret of his ever-increas- 
ing influence. The fact that he is a sort of 
living magnetic battery with a sonorous voice 
and a facile tongue has given a multitude of peo- 
ple the entirely erroneous impression that he 
has risen to eminence chiefly through the posses- 
sion of these gifts. The facts of the case, how- 
ever, are that among contemporary French 
statesmen there are few, if any, whose speeches 
and writings bear evidence of so much original 
thought or of so wide a range of scholarship 
as do those of M. Jaures. As a public speaker 
unquestionably he is a consummate artist, but 
beneath the charm of the artist are ever to be 
found the philosophic grasp of the profound 
thinker and the solid scientific competence of the 
indefatigable student. 

He is the founder and chief editorial writer 
of " L'Humanite," the French Socialist daily 
paper, as well as the author of several books, 
including a voluminous history of the French 
Revolution. At the Chamber of Deputies not 
only is he the recognized leader and oratorical 



58 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

sword arm of the " unified " Socialist group, but 
for a decade during all great national crises he 
has been the unvanquishable champion of pro- 
gressive Republicanism in its heroic struggle 
against the combined forces of Clericalism, Re- 
action and Monarchy. During the late radical 
Combes ministry he several times saved the 
Cabinet from certain defeat by his unanswerable 
arguments in defence of the policy of the gov- 
ernment, and his inspiring appeals to the better 
judgment, patriotism, and the sense of cohesion 
of the various elements comprising the " Bloc." 
As an expounder and interpreter of the con- 
structive ideals of French Republicanism he has 
had no equal during the life of the present Re- 
public. 

On January 24, 19 10, during the discussion 
of the perennial question of " lay schools," 
after M. Dommergue, the Minister of Public 
Instruction, had defended the government po- 
sition at great length but with indifferent suc- 
cess, and after M. Barres, the brilliant Aca- 
demician, had made an adroit, scholarly, and 
sparkling defence of the clerical theory of au- 
thoritative and traditional education, M. Jau- 
res arose and delivered an extemporaneous 
reply which, for breadth of view, scholarship, 
eloquence and dialectical skill, was universally 
recognized as a masterpiece. His interpreta- 



JEAN JAURES 59 

tion of the concrete, constructive ideals of the 
advocates of " lay education " was at once in- 
comparable, unanswerable, and final. Even 
his bitterest enemies among the deputies, as well 
as such conservative newspapers as the Lon- 
don Times, admitted that such a discourse 
could have been pronounced only by a man 
combining the best qualities of the professor 
of philosophy, the man of letters, and the prac- 
tised statesman. 

If I were to single out any one faculty of M. 
Jaures which more than any other gives him 
his easy intellectual mastery in French parlia- 
mentary debate, it would be his rare faculty of 
insight. It is not his personal magnetism, nor 
that subtle literary charm by which he has won 
the title of " the poet of the Chamber," nor 
yet his profound and many-sided erudition, but 
his ability to see further and to see more clearly 
than do any of his contemporaries, which ena- 
bles him so frequently to snatch victory from 
defeat and bring order out of the mental chaos 
resulting from a long, tiresome and confusing 
discussion. 

If only M. Jaures could see his way to cut 
loose from his present official connection with 
the fanatical or revolutionary wing of the So- 
cialist party and throw himself whole-heart- 
edly into his true work as the prophet of 



60 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

modern constructive democracy, it seems prob- 
able that France might again take a leading 
position among the nations of the world in the 
working out of those complex social, intellect- 
ual, and moral problems which are a common 
source of anxiety and bewilderment to all civ- 
ilized nations. 

It was a great loss to France when, on ac- 
count of the banishment of M. Millerand 
from the communion of orthodox socialists, 
he and M. Jaures no longer were permitted to 
collaborate in the intimate and effective old- 
time way. They complemented each other. 
But M. Millerand, without the cooperation 
and inspiration of M. Jaures, now works at the 
disadvantage of having lost somewhat of his 
moral enthusiasm and spiritual impetus. And, 
on the other hand, M. Jaures, not being by na- 
ture an organizer, administrator, or man of 
affairs, but rather a seer, a thinker, and a 
quickener of other men's souls, never since has 
been quite as splendidly effective as he was 
when, working in harmonious cooperation with 
M. Millerand and other strong men of diverse 
talents, he assumed the moral leadership of 
France by becoming the inspirer and interpreter 
of the political and social ideals of the Repub- 
lican " Bloc." Of recent years, moreover, he 
has had to work at the fatal disadvantage of 



JEAN JAURES 61 

being held in constant restraint by the narrow 
class prejudices, outgrown economic dogmas, 
and supposed political necessities of the " uni- 
fied " Socialists. In his more recent Parlia- 
mentary efforts one frequently can see how his 
genius is being hampered and held down by 
the invisible but none the less galling chains 
which bind him to a petrified social theory and 
an antiquated political method. It is true his 
influence on the Socialist party has been power- 
ful and altogether for the good, but it is equally 
true that its influence upon him has been quite 
as powerful and, temporarily at least, by no 
means wholly for the good. 

M. Jaures is by temperament a prophet; 
and his power, not only in France and upon his 
generation but throughout the world and upon 
succeeding generations, would be infinitely 
greater if he could be content to be a prophet, 
a voice crying in the wilderness if necessary, 
rather than the recognized chief of a political 
group which aspires to public place and power. 
Had he been willing to palliate and compro- 
mise, to " recognize the inevitable " and have 
recourse to the " expedient," unquestionably 
he could have been Prime Minister of France 
years ago. But he saw clearly the tragic fu- 
tility of attempting to lead a majority that was 
too short sighted, cowardly and selfish ever to 



62 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

be made into a really effective instrument of so- 
cial reconstruction. It is all the more strange, 
therefore, that he should fail to realize that 
even at the head of a Socialist ministry and 
supported by a Socialist majority, he would be 
similarly, though not equally handicapped by 
the mental and moral limitations of his sup- 
porters. Undoubtedly partisan narrowness is 
not as deplorable as moral blindness, and class 
fanaticism is less reprehensible than moral cow- 
ardice, but why voluntarily limit oneself to a 
futile choice between unnecessary evils? The 
truth is becoming every day more and more 
manifest that there is not sufficient moral dig- 
nity, spiritual vision, and altruistic enthusiasm 
in any one class or political party to save civili- 
zation from toxic poisoning and make possible 
the ushering in of a new and nobler form of 
social order. 

M. Jaures unmistakably is a man of vision, 
but if he were to an equal extent a man of 
faith, if he could but come to realize the limit- 
less power of the ideal to lift men out of and 
above the cramping confines of party and class 
and the sodden atmosphere of self, he would 
refuse any longer " to give to a faction what 
was meant for mankind," and regardless of 
immediate political results, would speak his vi- 



JEAN JAURES 63 

sion, his whole vision, and nothing but his vi- 
sion to whosoever had ears to hear and a mind 
to understand. 

I am very far from maintaining that to M. 
Jaures or to any one else has been or ever will 
be vouchsafed a vision of " the truth, the whole 
truth and nothing but the truth " concerning 
the detailed plans and specifications of the ideal 
future state. It seems highly improbable that 
any man will again be permitted to descend 
from Sinai with the laws and institutions re- 
quired by his own and future generations ac- 
curately worked out, dove-tailed and properly 
inscribed on tablets of stone. And yet if, as 
Mill says, " all political revolutions not affected 
by foreign conquest originate in moral revolu- 
tions," then is the work of the prophet or so- 
cial architect more creative and vital than that 
of any mere legislator or executive ruler. In- 
deed, it may truthfully be said that the world 
counts its steps onward and up the difficult 
steeps of progress, not by the number it can 
boast of astute political leaders or of men of 
blood and iron, but by the number of prophetic, 
seminal minds it has been vouchsafed. Lesser 
men can be found to formulate and carry out 
ingenious " policies of realization," to trans- 
late into laws and institutions the architectonic 



64 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

visions of the social seer, but their work is 
chiefly selective and adaptive; his alone is cre- 
ative and fundamental. 

During the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- 
turies the souls of the millions were enchanted 
and led captive by the ideal of human liberty. 
Generation after generation of men poured out 
their treasure and their blood to realize for 
themselves and for their children this God-sent 
vision. But now that this vision has become a 
reality, we, " the heirs of all the ages," ap- 
parently have settled down to a selfish and sod- 
den pursuit of material comfort. No new im- 
pulse has come to ruffle the calm and common- 
place surface of our souls with a divine dissat- 
isfaction and to lure us on to higher and more 
dangerous enterprises. No voice today 
speaks for the Ideal with the compelling elo- 
quence of a new and necessary revelation. 
That our liberty is but a means to nobler ends 
has indeed been divined by a few dreamers, 
but so far their faltering and uncertain accents 
have fallen on heavy ears. 

Before our generation can be fired with the 
faith and fervor for a new crusade, there must 
appear in our midst that rare phenomenon, a 
creative mind, a man to whom it shall be given 
to find the truth which can harmonize seeming 
antagonisms, to restate the conditions of life 



JEAN JAURES 65 

in the light of a higher social synthesis, and to 
indicate to this generation the steps of prog- 
ress which are necessary as well for the preser- 
vation of the treasures of the past as for the 
realization of the sublimer possibilities of the 
future. Great advocates always can be found 
for great principles; the people are never slow 
to join in a crusade where wisdom and heroism 
lead the van. Organizers of power spring up 
in the heart of every great movement. There- 
fore grant us but the inspiration and guidance 
of one adequate thinker and another step in the 
evolution of the race is assured. 



CHAPTER VI 
AN APOSTLE OF LIGHT 

For the past few years French thought and 
life have been profoundly influenced by a hand- 
ful of men — writers, teachers and statesmen, 
one of the most interesting of whom is Monsieur 
Charles Seignobos — " Professeur Titulaire " 
of history at the Sorbonne. Though only fifty- 
three years of age, Professor Seignobos already 
is regarded as a moral and intellectual leader 
by a host of young writers, teachers and poli- 
ticians in all parts of the world. Like most 
famous Frenchmen, and a number of great men 
of other nationalities, he is small in stature, 
being a little under five feet five inches high. 
But what he lacks in size, he makes up in the 
quality and power of his personality. On my 
first visit to him I recognized that he was a 
brilliant man, and as I learned to know him 
better I discovered that, in spite of his brus- 
querie and impetuosity, he was also one of the 
most lovable of men. 

In some ages a man like M. Seignobos might 
have gone into the army, and in others into the 

66 



AN APOSTLE OF LIGHT 67 

church, but it is typical of the peculiar present- 
day conditions of modern France that this man, 
who is the spiritual and intellectual descendant 
of all that was most heroic, self-sacrificing and 
efficient in the France of Louis XIV, felt drawn 
irresistibly toward a professorial career. 

During the lifetime of the present Republic, 
the French army has been relegated to a posi- 
tion of secondary importance in the national 
life. For to men of insight, whose view has 
not been distorted by an unreasoning passion for 
vengeance against Germany, it has become 
steadily more apparent that in the last analysis, 
the salvation of France does not depend pri- 
marily upon the strength of her military organ- 
ization. Moreover, since the advent of the 
agnostic spirit, in the train of the " great revo- 
lution " at the close of the eighteenth century, 
the call of the church — Protestant or Catholic 
— has met with little response from French so- 
cial idealists and humanitarians. 

Politics has made a strong appeal to a num- 
ber of modern knights errant, such as Clemen- 
ceau, Briand and Jaures, but while Professor 
Seignobos has felt keenly the power of this ap- 
peal, he nevertheless has recognized that what 
France needs most is light rather than heat, 
guidance rather than organization, and that a 
temporary patchwork of political reform is 



68 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

vastly less important than a solid scientific un- 
derstanding of all the factors in the case. He 
believes that the only power able to combat suc- 
cessfully the forces of ignorance, intolerance 
and tyranny is the power of the university and 
the school. Consequently, into the great work 
of education he has thrown himself with the 
ardor of a soldier and the devotion of an 
apostle. 

American newspapers and magazines furnish 
their readers with a certain amount of informa- 
tion concerning the political and artistic progress 
of France, but up to the present time they have 
published extremely little about the extraordi- 
nary transformation which has taken place in 
its educational system during the latter half of 
the nineteenth century. At the birth of the 
present French Republic, the government was 
confronted by two problems; the first, that of 
transforming a mass of church school graduates 
into a corps of lay teachers; and the second, 
that of forming a stable and satisfactory re- 
public out of a nation split up into warring fac- 
tions, such as the Bonapartists, Orleanists, 
Royalists, Clericals, Anti-Semites, Nationalists, 
Radicals, Radical Socialists, Guesdists and 
Blanquists, devoid of the tolerance, patience and 
confidence in free institutions which are essen- 
tial to the success of a democratic form of gov- 



AN APOSTLE OF LIGHT 69 

ernment. These problems which had proved 
baffling to the statesmen of the First and Second 
Republics, probably would have proven equally 
so to the statesmen of the present regime, had 
they not been assisted in their task by a corps 
of able, devoted and enthusiastic educators. 
Owing to the splendid efforts of these men, how- 
ever, France of recent years has made greater 
headway against illiteracy than any other Euro- 
pean nation. In 1872 the number of her re- 
cruits who could neither read nor write was 
19.13 per cent.; by 1890 this percentage had 
fallen one-half and by 1905 it had been reduced 
to 4.83. 

All that politicians and statesmen can do is 
to give expression in laws and institutions to the 
intellectual and spiritual progress which already 
has been made by the individual citizens of a 
country. But the work of the educator, in that 
it forms and reforms the individual units of so- 
ciety, is creative and fundamental. Hence it 
is that the growing stability and power of the 
present French Republic is due more largely 
than is generally understood to such scholars as 
Ferry, Pecaut, Buisson, Seailles and Seignobos. 

Professor Seignobos is chiefly known in 
America by his " Political History of Europe 
since 18 14," a work which was translated by 
Professor S. M. McVane of Harvard a few 



7 o LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

years ago, and which almost immediately ac- 
quired the wide popularity it so richly merited. 
But while he has chosen the nineteenth century 
as his special field, Professor Seignobos has an 
encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of all 
periods. His " Histoire Narrative et Descrip- 
tive des Anciens Peuples de TOrient," " Le 
Regime Feodal en Bourgogne," " Histoire de 
la Grece," " Histoire du Peuple Romain " in 
three volumes, and his " Histoire de Civiliza- 
tion " in two volumes are evidences of his un- 
flagging industry and insatiable mental curiosity. 
Recently he has been engaged on a continuation 
of the monumental history of France which 
Professor Lavisse brought down to the end of 
the eighteenth century. 

An example of the versatility of the man is 
to be found in his recent series of ancient, 
mediaeval and modern school histories, in seven 
volumes, which appeared a few years ago under 
the general title of " Cours d'Histoire." I 
asked him why he had turned aside from his 
original research work to engage in this species 
of compilation, which already had been done 
so many times before and which so many his- 
torians were qualified to do again. The an- 
swer he gave was characteristic of the man and 
of his conception of his mission. 

" Nothing is more important," he said, " than 



AN APOSTLE OF LIGHT 71 

that children should be given from the start the 
best and truest presentation of history that can 
be written. A child's first impressions are its 
most lasting ones, and no work has ever given 
me more pleasure than this attempt to aid in 
starting the school children of France along 
the straight and narrow path of historical 
verity." 

M. Seignobos has never been married, but his 
home, a few doors from that of ex-President 
Loubet, in the heart of the Latin Quarter, is pre- 
sided over by Madame Marillier, a great-grand- 
daughter of Madame Roland, and one of the 
most charming and youthful of women in spite 
of her seventy-three years. After the little 
Wednesday night dinners to which he always 
invites a few kindred spirits among the " in- 
tellectuels " in Paris, a number of other inter- 
esting people — writers, artists, students and 
politicians — drop in to imbibe a cup of ten 
o'clock tea and to indulge in that art which is 
almost extinct elsewhere, and is becoming rare 
even in France — the stimulating if evanescent 
art of conversation. I was interested to hear 
a Chicago University professor remark that this 
salon of Professor Seignobos and Madame 
Marillier was the only real ." salon " left in 
Paris, and I was even more interested in M. 
Seignobos' reply when I repeated this remark 



72 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

to him. " Ours is not," he said, " a typical 
French salon. In the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries a salon was chiefly a place where 
people congregated to see and be seen, to hear 
and say clever things. The people who met at 
these places did not necessarily have anything 
in common except their vanity — which is the 
dominant sentiment in French polite society. 
We have merely a reunion of friends who come 
together for the purpose not of impressing each 
other, but of exchanging ideas, stimulating their 
ethical emotions and gratifying their intellectual 
and social instincts." 

The dinner preceding the soiree, while en- 
tirely unpretentious, is fit for an epicure. Later 
in the evening when the coffee and tea have 
worked their work of stimulating to its highest 
pitch that extremely susceptible substance, the 
French brain, the Professor often is to be seen 
standing in a corner (literally not figuratively, 
for I have never seen him cornered in an argu- 
ment) squaring himself against the wall, while 
around him an excited group converses, disputes 
and laughs in the same breath. Sometimes his 
voice rises higher and higher in the excitement 
of debate until it almost reaches a shout — 
when Madame Marillier, quite accustomed to 
these scenes, though never entirely reconciled 
to their noisy climaxes, looks over and in a 



AN APOSTLE OF LIGHT 73 

deprecatory way says, " Charles, Charles, what 
is it now? " 

Professor Seignobos is an American en- 
thusiast; so much so in fact that he is almost 
equally enthusiastic about our past, our present, 
and our future. No one is better aware than 
he of our deficiencies, but with that sense of 
perspective which has enabled him to become 
one of the greatest of living historians he sees 
that our weaknesses in the main are incidental, 
whereas our virtues and our inherent but as yet 
undeveloped capacities for good are both vital 
and fundamental. One night, during the winter 
of 1904, while discussing the future of America, 
after a long and eulogistic statement on his part 
as to our marvelous possibilities, some one 
asked: 

" But what about the corruption in American 
politics? Is not that a poison in the blood 
which is likely to pollute and finally corrupt the 
entire social organism? " 

" No," he replied, " I think not." 

" But are you aware," pursued his questioner, 
" that in America not only municipal councils, 
state legislatures and the national Congress are 
influenced by indirect if not by direct bribery ; not 
only is the scum of the cities bought up like cattle 
on election days, but in recent years even the sup- 
posedly incorruptible yeomanry, the farmers of 



74 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

the land, have been known to sell their votes in 
large numbers? " 

" And why not? " he replied; " why shouldn't 
they? So far as I know for a quarter of a cen- 
tury there has been practically no choice be- 
tween your two great parties ; there has been no 
issue before the American people that was 
worthy of their serious consideration and in 
behalf of which any one had the right to call 
upon them to make sacrifices. In the interested 
political squabbles between different sections of 
the country and between those special interests 
which for so long have dominated both of your 
two great parties, I don't know that it has made 
five dollars' worth of difference to the average 
man, whether one set of political incompetents 
and mercenaries came into power or another. 
But make no mistake, when in the course of 
time, a real issue of vital importance, involving 
some fundamental moral principle, is brought 
before the American people, you will no more 
be able to buy them, or fool them in regard to 
that issue, than you can tamper with the move- 
ments of the tides." 

On the principle that a skilful selection of 
guests is as necessary to the success of an even- 
ing as is the choice of proper combinations in 
food, one night we arranged a little dinner with 
M. Seignobos and M. Paul Sabatier, author of 



AN APOSTLE OF LIGHT 75 

the " Life of Saint Francis " as the conversa- 
tional pieces de resistance. Of course Madame 
Marillier was there — the " little mother " as 
she is lovingly called by a host of friends — 
gracious and gentle, like wine of some rare vint- 
age mellowed with the years, bringing to this 
feast of the present a certain fine flavor and 
fragrance out of the past. We also invited a 
young Belgian artist, an enthusiast fresh from 
a triumph in the Salon; an American beauty, a 
cross between a Botticelli and a Gibson girl, 
added for purely decorative purposes; an unob- 
trusive Parisian man of scholarly tastes with a 
gift for quiet appreciation of others; Professor 

de L from the Lycee with his spirituelle 

young American wife; and Dr. K , a well- 
known Protestant clergyman, whom we counted 
on to add a dash of theological brimstone to the 
conversation. 

At dinner, as we had hoped, M. Seignobos 
and M. Sabatier took charge of the table talk, 
which turned upon the then paramount question 
in France, the separation of church and state. 
M. Seignobos represents the best elements of 
French agnosticism, while M. Sabatier stands 
for the liberal element in both Protestantism 
and Catholicism. Sparks flew in every direc- 
tion, and even Dr. K , by his self-satisfied 

way of giving utterance to worn-out religious 



7 6 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

formulae, all unwittingly arose to the occasion 
and played the part which had been assigned to 
him. 

The faces of M. Seignobos and M. Sabatier 
as they talked, were as expressive as their 
words, while their shoulders, after the manner 
of the French, were almost as eloquent as their 
tongues. I was impressed afresh with M. 
Sabatier's lion-like head and strangely luminous 
eyes. Although sure of his own ground, he 
shows always such an exquisite deference for 
others that one is apt involuntarily to throw up 
one's hands, unable to resist the charm of his 
rarely winning personality. 

With M. Seignobos, however, it is different; 
he does not take you instantly by storm; rather 
his brusque manner of riding rough-shod over 
your opinions and prejudices en route to the con- 
clusion of his argument, which he often thunders 
out in a voice raised above all disputing voices, 
is apt at first to rouse opposition and to put 
every one on the defensive. His most striking 
mental characteristic is a wonderful lucidity of 
both thought and expression, a scientific pre- 
cision of reasoning that goes straight as a 
cannon-ball to its mark, and is as merciless to 
anything in its path. His conversation at times 
is like a two-edged sword. He reminds one of 
some mediaeval knight slashing a way for him- 



AN APOSTLE OF LIGHT 77 

self across the enemy's camp — a veritable con- 
versational d'Artagnan. 

M. Sabatier was leaving for Rome that night, 
so he excused himself at once after dinner. 
When he had gone the conversation became 
more general, though it still followed for a time 
the line of religious discussion which the dinner 
talk had given it. The fact was significant to 
me that among these Frenchmen, only one of 
whom was an avowed Christian and most of 
whom were agnostics, the question of religion 
should yet have been the one which called out 
the expression of their deepest feelings. As 
M. Sabatier once said, a remark which has been 
so widely quoted because it is so universally 
true, " Man is incurably religious." What bet- 
ter witness is there to the truth of that state- 
ment, I thought, than was to be found in this 
evening's religious discussion by these free-think- 
ing Frenchmen. 

In a five minutes' monologue, which took the 
form of an answer to a question from the Lycee 
Professor, M. Seignobos traced the entire his- 
tory of Christendom, from its beginning until 
now. As in a lightning flash, epoch after epoch 
passed before us, with kaleidoscopic swiftness 
and clearness, while, with the sure instinct of a 
master, he noted as well the determining factors 
in the history of other world-religions — the 



78 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

Mohammedan, the Egyptian, the Buddhist and 
the Confucian. 

Dr. K in his conversation with M. 

Seignobos made the mistake of not attempt- 
ing to find common ground and lost no 
opportunity to quibble over terms. This 
attitude so irritated M. Seignobos that at 
times he made some rather exaggerated state- 
ments, apparently in the vain effort to shake 
the man out of his self-satisfaction, and cause 
him, if possible, to look facts straight in the 
face without the interposition of the theological 
dogmas of his particular denomination. 

" The Christian religion," he thundered, 
" was founded on fear and the devil." Dr. 

K threw up his hands in dumb horror 

too indignant for response, but the Ameri- 
can wife of the Lycee professor nettled by 
this outburst sprang into the breach. " I 
can't agree with you in that," she said. " It's 
not the devil driving from below, it's the 
God drawing from above that makes real Chris- 
tians, that impels rather than compels men to 
follow their highest. It's the very same spirit 
that is working in you, ' the anonymous God,' 
as Wagner puts it, who is inspiring you to de- 
vote your life to your ideals." Then turning 
to Madame Marillier, she added, " Why is it, 
I wonder, that in France to-day there are so 



AN APOSTLE OF LIGHT 79 

many men like that — all unconscious of the 
God within them who is yet their secret 
strength? " 

" When religion becomes a state affair," con- 
tinued M. Seignobos, " it is always a failure. 
There is no life in it; it is dead. These dead 
religions do not appeal to me except as historical 
specimens. It is life that interests me." 

" You say that life appeals to you — what 
about the soul-life? the life of St. Francis, for 
instance? I asked tentatively, hoping to get at 
his real belief, and thinking instinctively of M. 
Sabatier and his wonderful delineation of the 
spirit of the " little, poor man of Assisi." 

" Few things interest me more," responded 
M. Seignobos quickly; " that is just my point; 
St. Francis' religion was not a religion of ex- 
ternal authority any more than that which 

Madame de L champions. It was vital 

because it was an inside affair." 

" You have defined Christianity exactly," ex- 
claimed Madame de L , " and almost in the 

words of its Founder, ' the Kingdom of 
Heaven is within you.' Real religion can never 
be imposed from without. Only shams are put 
off and on like overcoats." 

" I agree with you," he replied; " far be it 
from me to offer any objection to that brand of 
Christianity; but," he added quickly, " I fear 



80 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

neither Protestant nor Catholic orthodox 
churches will tolerate your broad conception of 
religion, or receive you into their folds." 

It was Madame de L 's chance now to 

take definite issue with Dr. K 's attitude, 

which had exasperated her no less than it had 
M. Seignobos, probably because of the narrow- 
minded way in which he had attempted to de- 
fend what she felt so passionately was, after all, 
their common faith. " What does it matter if 
the churches refuse me if only God accepts? ' 
she answered with an exultant ring in her voice 
that made M. Seignobos clap his hands. 

" Tout a fait American that," he said, laugh- 
ing; " another Declaration of Independence. 
But there are in the Protestant as well as in the 
Roman Catholic church two essentially different 
categories of believers — those whose religious 
life is based on a real and vital personal experi- 
ence, and those whose so-called religious life is 
based on the external authority of a book or a 
church organization." 

At this point the artist broke into the con- 
versation. " It seems to me," he observed, 
" that people in general fall by nature into one 
or the other of the two classes you mention — 
those who in the very nature of things must see 
for themselves and have their opinions first- 
hand, and those who have all their convictions 



AN APOSTLE OF LIGHT 81 

handed down to them ready-made. For ex- 
ample, we all know the two types of sight-seers 
that one meets in every picture-gallery in Eu- 
rope ; those who follow blindly in the footsteps 
of Baedeker without ever attempting to consider 
a picture on its own merits. " 

"Yes, we all know that type," M. Seignobos 
groaned, while the American beauty wore the 
constrained look of one who is being photo- 
graphed. 

" And that other type," the artist continued, 
" of those few who by using their own initiative 
and their own aesthetic sense get all the zest and 
thrill of a vital personal experience." 

" And doesn't this analogy make clear," in- 
terposed Madame de L , " that the real line 

of cleavage is not between Christian and agnostic 
but between the bigot, whether he be Christian 
or agnostic on the one hand, and, on the other, 
the sincere seeker after truth? " 

" In other words," replied M. Seignobos, 
" we are all agreed that ' nothing is intolerable 
except intolerance.' " 

" We have so many ideals in common that 
the gulf which divides us isn't as abysmal after 
all as it sometimes seems," she exclaimed, with 
a smile that included M. Seignobos and Dr. 
K in its appeal. 

" Certainly not," responded M. Seignobos, 



82 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

turning genially toward Dr. K , " My house 

in l'Ardiche is occupied and has been for years 
free of rent by one of your colleagues, the pastor 
of the Protestant church there. Perhaps you 
know him," he continued cordially, " the Pastor 
R , un tres brave homme" 

The whole atmosphere of the place seemed to 
change suddenly from a condition of intense heat 
to one of congenial warmth and good cheer, as 
when in an overheated room a window is sud- 
denly thrown open. The courageous spirit of 
independence and deep spirituality of Madame 

de L had somehow come in upon the heat 

of debate, introducing into this highly charged 
French atmosphere a whiff of that free invigor- 
ating air from across the sea, which is the purify- 
ing breath of our national life. Even the 
American beauty felt the sudden change in the 
psychic atmosphere. " Then you are not an 
atheist after all," she breathed, evidently much 
relieved at her discovery, while all joined in 
the laugh that followed M. Seignobos' witty 
disclaimer. 

Although Dr. K smiled at the time, later 

on his old prejudices reasserted themselves, and 
as he was leaving he remarked with a note of 
genuine sadness in his voice : " What a pity 
it is that so brilliant a mind as that of M. 
Seignobos should be so woefully perverted." 



AN APOSTLE OF LIGHT 83 

As Professor de L and his wife had come 

into the vestibule in time to catch this parting 
shot I gave them the benefit of the response 
which I had with difficulty refrained from 

making to Dr. K . " Isn't it a shame," I 

said, paraphrasing the doctor's remark, " that 
so good a man should be so narrow, so incapable 
of rating at its true religious value the spirit of 
devotion to his ideals of this high-minded student 
whose intellect, developed at the expense of 
his emotions, unfortunately prevents him from 
accepting anything on faith in heaven above or 
on the earth beneath." 

Professor de L , who during the evening 

had let his wife be spokesman for the family, 
now roused himself. " It's a curious fact," he 

said, " and one which Dr. K and many 

others might be inclined to dispute; but among 
the French agnostics whom I happen to know, 
such as Clemenceau, Jaures, Anatole France, 
Seailles and others — men who are considered 
by many Americans as the open and blatant 
enemies of all things religious and spiritual, 
hardly one is to be found who would not agree 
with M. Seignobos in welcoming with open 
mind every manifestation of real goodness and 
vital spirituality." 

" The heart of the man is pure gold," inter- 
rupted his wife. " To-night when he was argu- 



84 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

ing so fiercely with Dr. K , Madame Maril- 

lier said to me, ' His bark is so much worse 
than his bite. In all these long years of our 
acquaintance, since he was my dead son's best 
friend at the University, I have never known 
of his doing an unkind act, and I am sure he is 
incapable of thinking a mean thought.' 

" Do you know," I replied, " the picture of 
him to-night, helping Madame Marillier down 
the steps, tucking her arm under his so gently, 
and saying in his big gruff voice, ' Take care, 
Little Mother, don't slip,' was typical to me of 
the work he is trying to do for France to-day. 
These are the words he is speaking to the 
Mother Republic whose steps he with others 
is trying to guide past the pitfalls and traps that 
are set by her enemies, into a path that is safe 
for her feet." 



CHAPTER VII 
CHARLES WAGNER 

A SOCIAL MYSTIC 

Tired out from a feverish day's work in 
Paris, one sultry afternoon I wandered into the 
Louvre, seeking an escape from that atmos- 
phere of weariness and sordidness which some- 
times hangs like a pall over a great city. As I 
dropped listlessly into a seat in one of the mod- 
ern French rooms a landscape by Corot caught 
my eye, and I suddenly became conscious of a 
new and serener world, of green pastures by 
still waters and trees bending low; of the mys- 
tery of night about to fall, and of a sunset 
which seemed like God's word of peace to His 
tired earth. As wine enters one's veins, or love 
one's heart, the spirit of all-enveloping calm 
that pervaded the picture passed into my soul, 
and I felt refreshed and renewed. Corot had 
shared with me a vision that had come to him 
in his communion with nature, and made me 
feel for myself something of the possibilities 
of such communion. 

85 



86 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

A few days later, on hearing Charles Wag- 
ner, I was impressed with the fact that his 
preaching contains something of the same sub- 
tle quality that permeates Corot's painting. 
While the one reveals the possible harmony 
between man and nature, the other reveals the 
possible harmony between man and nature's 
God. Dr. Lyman Abbott once drew a distinc- 
tion between the function of the poet who ex- 
presses his vision for the pure joy of express- 
ing it, regardless of the effect on the men 
to whom it may come, and that of the prophet 
who, because of a definite spiritual purpose, is 
impelled to share his vision with his fellow men. 

While Charles Wagner has much of the poet 
in him, he is above all a prophet, having power- 
fully developed what Herbert Spencer calls 
" the religious consciousness which is concerned 
with that which lies beyond the world of sense." 
His vision has to do with those great spiritual 
realities which are the background of all life. 
Above the babel of earth's voices he is forever 
hearing God calling to man, and like some eter- 
nal echo of deep calling unto deep, that 
answering cry of the human soul which will 
not be satisfied with anything less than God. 
To show how this craving after the Divine, 
which is the highest instinct of the human, may 
be satisfied, how ordinary men and women may 



CHARLES WAGNER 87 

enter into a real and vital communion with De- 
ity and get strength and uplift from such com- 
munion — this is Wagner's mission. 

About twenty-seven years ago Charles Wag- 
ner, an unknown country pastor, following the 
example of practically all great Frenchmen 
brought up in the provinces, turned first his 
thoughts and then his footsteps towards Paris 
in order to gain a new intellectual stimulus and 
a more sympathetic hearing in this city which, 
since the middle ages, like a huge magnet has 
gathered to itself all the characteristic elements 
of French life. With his young wife he began 
Paris life in a very modest way, living in a 
three-room apartment in a poor street near the 
Bastille, working hard at the University through 
the week and supplying an occasional pulpit 
on Sundays. But the ardent young preacher, 
burning to speak his message, soon found all 
orthodox pulpits closed to him. Not daunted 
by this cold reception of his ideas where he had 
hoped they would be best understood and ap- 
preciated, he established under the auspices 
of the liberal Protestant church a small Sun- 
day-school in the Bastille neighborhood. This 
Sunday-school was the germ of his first church 
and later of the large new church which he calls 
" The Home of the Soul."^ 

1 " The Home of the Soul," a^rranslation of Wagner's ser- 



88 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

Although most of the people in the vicinity of 
his mission were descendants of the first " apos- 
tles of reason," and had as their heritage a 
contempt for all forms of religion, the man 
and his message gradually found a way past 
all barriers of prejudice and superstition into 
their hearts. It is characteristic of the tact 
and good sense of the young preacher that he 
did not arouse unnecessary hostility to his mes- 
sage by laying undue emphasis on the fact that 
while often discarding " the letter," it embod- 
ied all that was most vital in the spirit of the 
old dogmas. That was his answer later, how- 
ever, to those agnostics known in France as 
libres penseurs who denied that anything of 
value for men of today could be extracted 
from the creeds and faiths of yesterday. It 
was his response likewise to the orthodox who 
challenged his methods, questioning whether 
the power of religion could still exist if its 
forms were changed. But the fact that " the 
letter " has played so decreasingly small a part 
in his preaching has not tended to reinstate him 
in favor with the Paris synod. Strange as it 
may seem to his friends in America, where he 
was received with open arms by evangelical 
people everywhere, only one pulpit in Paris, 

mons with an introduction by Lyman Abbott, has been pub- 
lished by Funk & Wagnalls, New York. 



CHARLES WAGNER 89 

that of the Oratoire, is today open to him. 

But M. Wagner, like all strong men, has 
made the most not only of his opportunities but 
also of his obstacles. He has not always been 
able to brush these aside, but in the end he has 
usually succeeded in dominating them and in 
utilizing them for his own purposes. Thus the 
refusal on the part of orthodox circles to recog- 
nize him merely resulted in forcing him to build 
up an independent organization in accordance 
with his own conception of what a church 
should be and do and stand for. 

As his church is a departure in many ways 
from the typical modern church, so his idea of 
the duties of a pastor differs from the prevail- 
ing idea that he should be a sort of spiritual 
maid of all work for his parish, bound to de- 
vote himself almost exclusively to the exacting 
and often unimportant details of a parochial 
charge. Having refused to submit to this form 
of pastoral slavery which is considered by 
many congregations to be a divinely ordered 
institution, he has kept himself free to bend a 
part of his energies to the great work outside 
the church to which he feels called. His custom 
of preaching only twice each month might be 
assigned as one of the chief reasons why his 
sermons when he does preach are so spontane- 
ous and full of power, retaining as they do all 



9 o LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

the original strength and essence of thought 
and feeling that necessarily would have been 
largely forfeited had they been diluted to meet 
the demands ordinarily made upon Protestant 
clergymen. By thus limiting his output of ser- 
mons, he also has secured leisure for the writ- 
ing of those books which have gone into all the 
world, preaching his simple gospel. 

The way he practises in every detail of his 
own church this gospel of simplicity was strik- 
ingly borne in on me several years ago when I 
entered his " Salle " in the Rue Arquebusiers. 
It was almost bare except for the chairs that 
were crowded into every available space in a 
vain effort to accommodate the people who 
stood patiently in the aisles, lined the steps on 
each side of the pulpit, or overflowed into the 
pastor's small study behind. A few days after 
hearing him preach I had the pleasure of meet- 
ing him for the first time. His memories of 
the enthusiastic reception accorded him in 
" the States " were still green and bore fruit 
of the utmost cordiality in his treatment of 
Americans. While speaking of his great de- 
sire for a new church he explained that, al- 
though a large sum for a site had been prom- 
ised him by some American friends on condition 
that he should raise an equal sum for the build- 



CHARLES WAGNER 91 

ing, he would much prefer to use that amount 
in securing a cheaper lot in the same poor quar- 
ter of Paris and erecting on it a simple edifice 
large enough to hold his ever-increasing audi- 
ences — since he had no time to raise money 
for a costly church. 

This ambition at last has been realized, and 
his new church, 2 which has been dedicated 
lately in the Bastille neighborhood, has a seat- 
ing capacity four times as large as the old hall. 
Connected with it in the same building is a sort 
of social service annex, a " centre of activity 
for all volunteers of good will, the hive where 
we work close to the solitude where we pray," 
as Monsieur Wagner puts it. 

In spite of the title " Pastor Wagner " by 
which the world knows him, and notwithstand- 
ing the fact that his passion to give personal 
help to men and women in their individual re- 
ligious needs has led him to organize and carry 
forward so enthusiastically his Paris church, 
looking at his life as a whole one is inclined to 
lay quite as much stress on the active part he 
has taken as a French citizen as on his more 
distinctly clerical work. He has never al- 
lowed himself to become absorbed exclusively 

2 This church cost over $6o,ooo, of which sum a little less 
than one-fourth was contributed by Americans. 



92 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

in the professional side of his mission, and is 
fond of reminding his hearers that Christ was a 
layman, not a priest. 

11 Down with religion," is the cry of great 
numbers of people in France to-day. It is the 
cry of blasphemous and ignorant men, — ene- 
mies of morality and order who would like 
to choke all spiritual life out of the nation 
for the mere satisfaction of seeing a God of love 
they are too base to appreciate supplanted by a 
Goddess of Reason they are too feeble to un- 
derstand. It is a cry which is joined in by cer- 
tain really spiritually minded libres penseurs, 
who feel forced by their very religious instincts 
to call themselves irreligious; men who deny, 
as Buisson says, the " God of theology " in or- 
der the better to possess what they are pleased 
to call the " interior God of the conscience." 
When this cry is ringing out so loud in France 
that it is heard the world over, and men are 
wondering what the religious fate of the nation 
will be, it may interest M. Wagner's American 
friends who know him chiefly as a writer and a 
preacher, to learn something of Wagner, the 
French citizen, trying to help solve the prob- 
lems and work out the destiny of his own peo- 
ple. 

There are two characteristics of Charles 



CHARLES WAGNER 93 

Wagner which make him peculiarly fitted to be 
of service to France now: First of all, he is a 
man of faith. "He at least believes in soul; 
he is very sure of God." At a time when the 
fierce waves of materialism and of superstition 
alike seem to be threatening the foundations 
of her spiritual life, France has need of men 
who stand for the great essentials of religious 
truth and who have power to communicate to 
others that profound faith in the reality of the 
life of the spirit which in all ages has been the 
saving faith of men and of nations. Secondly, 
he is a man of tolerance. There is a type of 
easy-going tolerance which is due largely to a 
lack of any vital religious convictions, but it is 
just because Charles Wagner's religious convic- 
tions are the expression of his deepest being, 
the outgrowth of his profound experience of 
life, — just because, in a word, his faith is so 
deep, — that he is reverently tolerant toward 
the differing belief or even the sincere unbelief 
of other souls who are honestly seeking the 
truth as he himself has sought it. And France 
to-day has a profound need of men of tolerance, 
for one of the chief obstacles to her normal 
development is the spirit of intolerance that 
pervades all her parties, religious and political. 
As some one has said, her religious men are too 
often inclined to regard the libres penseurs as 



94 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

rascals, while the libres penseurs in turn are 
too apt to treat the men who believe in God as 
imbeciles. 

In the midst of one crowd of fanatics claim- 
ing to have in science a monopoly of absolute 
truth and another crowd of fanatics claiming 
to have in revelation a like monopoly, Charles 
Wagner, with rare sanity, recognizes that no 
monopoly of truth is ever possible for any age 
or for any creed, since by God's law of evolu- 
tion new truth forever is being added to old 
truth as it is revealed in the laboratory of the 
chemist and in the souls of the pure in heart. 

Among the many invaluable services which 
he has rendered to his generation is one with 
which his name is not ordinarily associated. 
More than twenty-five years ago he helped to 
organize a certain " Fraternal Aid Society," 
whose purpose was to draw into closer sympa- 
thy and fellowship with each other brain work- 
ers and manual laborers. This comparatively 
insignificant society was the germ of that re- 
markable institution, the " Popular Univer- 
sity," developed later by M. Wagner and his 
associates, which has had such a wide and in- 
creasingly potent influence on the moral and in- 
tellectual life of the non-churchgoing laborers 
of the French capital. 

Some of the most interesting meetings I at- 



CHARLES WAGNER 95 

tended in Paris were held under the auspices of 
the " Universite Populaire " in the poorer quar- 
ters of the city where such men as Anatole 
France, Prof. Seailles, Ferdinand Buisson, 
Chas. Seignobos, and other intellectual lights of 
France were conducting inspiring evening 
classes for working men. 

While virtually concerned in all the prob- 
lems, industrial and social as well as moral and 
religious, that his country has to solve, his in- 
terest in education, from the work of primary 
schools on up through the normal schools, has 
always been one of the most absorbing of his 
busy life. He is in close touch with hundreds 
of teachers all over France and for many years 
has contributed a weekly article on morals to 
one of the leading French school journals. 
Since the publication of " Youth " — that trum- 
pet call to the young people of the nation — 
his passionate appeal to them has always been 
to make of their lives the channels through 
which strength and virtue and honor might flow 
in to purify and uplift the nation — in a word, 
to save France through themselves. 

Several years ago the intellectual atmosphere 
among the liberal elements in Paris was consid- 
erably clarified by the appearance of a little 
volume containing a series of open letters ad- 
dressed to each other by M. Wagner and M. 



96 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

Ferdinand Buisson. M. Buisson is one of the 
ablest among contemporary French thinkers, an 
educational authority, and one of the leaders 
of what might be termed for want of a better 
name the religious agnostics — men whose lives 
are dominated by a passionate idealism and 
who follow the far off vision of an ab- 
stract goodness and love, all unconscious of the 
God within them who is yet their secret 
strength. 

The object of these letters was to show how 
much common ground really does exist, in spite 
of their different phraseology, between these 
libres penseurs, who are religious at heart, and 
those professedly religious men whose religion 
is based not on external authority, either Cath- 
olic or Protestant, but on the witness of the 
spirit within their own souls. 

While the discussion demonstrated that these 
two classes of men have numerous points of 
agreement, it also revealed a marked lack of 
agreement between them as to the value of 
existing religious forms and organizations. 
Whereas the libres penseurs for the most part 
hold that the only hope of a free and spontane- 
ous ethical development in France in the future 
lies in a complete uprooting of all existing re- 
ligious dogmas and organizations, M. Wagner 
takes a more conservative view. 



CHARLES WAGNER 97 

" You say that you wish," writes M. Buis- 
son, " to find again under the thick covering of 
superstition the human foundation of the gos- 
pel. Commence, then, by frankly proclaiming 
that you will keep nothing of all the traditional 
wrappings, nothing of miracles, nothing of 
dogma, nothing of the sacraments — nothing 
of all this borrowed religion which stifles the 
true." 

" In that case," replies M. Wagner, " we 
should not be liberal protestants, religious in- 
dependents, but nihilists and iconoclasts. Our 
work is a work of criticism, of judgment, of 
choice, and not a vast policy of destruction. 
To make a clean sweep of all that recalls the 
past, — would that be to disentangle the true 
from the borrowed religion? Would it not be 
rather to reject pell mell the good and the bad? 
If the roots are pulled up and all religion is 
done away with now, where will we get the seed 
for the other harvest? No! We cannot af- 
ford to lose one bit of the good that humanity 
has garnered. We men — Protestants of the 
advance guard, pioneers of the future — do not 
wish to sacrifice any conquest of the grand past 
of our race. Our task is to wash away the 
dross, but do not ask us at the same time to 
cast away the old pure gold of our traditions." 

But Charles Wagner is not content with sim- 



98 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

ply bringing into closer spiritual sympathy men 
who consciously or unconsciously have the wit- 
ness in their own lives of the power of the Un- 
seen. He would harness all such spiritual en- 
ergy to practical ends, believing it important 
not only to " hitch wagons to stars," but to 
hitch stars to wagons. Being a child of this 
age, he realizes with Swedenborg that " all re- 
ligion has relation to life; " that, while a man 
may be essentially religious and yet remain un- 
conscious of the God within him, " the anony- 
mous God," as he puts it, a man cannot possi- 
bly be really religious and yet remain oblivious 
to suffering men and women about him. In ac- 
cordance with this idea, some fifteen years ago 
M. Wagner, together with M. Paul Des Jar- 
dins, founded " The Union for Moral Action," 
an organization in which he sought to bring 
together in practical work devoted men among 
agnostics, Roman Catholics, Protestants, and 
Jews, who, while differing most widely in their 
ideas about divinity, have yet that " spirit of 
genuine piety which gives them a very tender 
human respect for the value of every man," 
and inspires them to common efforts in behalf 
of their fellows. This spirit of piety M. Wag- 
ner rates at its true religious value, whether 
he finds it within or without the church, but he 
considers as worse than blasphemy the profes- 



CHARLES WAGNER 99 

sions of those churchmen whose love for God 
does not find expression in some sort of ener- 
getic and adequate social service. 

When one realizes how large a part of his 
time is taken up with secular activities, how 
broad-minded is his fellowship with men of all 
manner of belief and unbelief, how alive he is 
to the necessity of establishing the reign of so- 
cial justice on earth and of ministering to the 
imperative material needs of men, how open 
he is to new truth, how impatient of all those 
traditional theological fetters that would inter- 
fere with the freedom of the individual spirit, 
one is apt to question whether he may not have 
sacrificed depth of spirituality to breadth of 
intellectual vision, whether the practical side of 
his nature may not overshadow the mystical 
side, and his love for man be a more dominant 
force in his life than his love for God, — 
whether, in short, his religion does not bear 
more the image of the earthy than of the heav- 
enly. To all questions such as these one who 
has any understanding of the secret springs of 
action in Charles Wagner's life would find him- 
self obliged to give an unequivocal " No ! " 

While undoubtedly laying the chief emphasis 
on the spirit of a man's life rather than on the 
letter of his belief, M. Wagner's policy can in 
no sense be interpreted as a mere letting-down 



ioo LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

of the traditional bars, a proclamation that 
either good impulses, good deeds or any amount 
of scientific or theological knowledge can take 
the place of a vital religious faith. Listening 
to him, one instinctively feels that he speaks 
with that authority which comes primarily from 
an intimate and vital experience of the truth he 
preaches, or rather of the life he seeks to com- 
municate, for his chief effort seems to be not so 
much to convince the intelligence as to awaken 
the spiritual nature to a consciousness of God, 
and to bring it into a state of receptivity to 
those divine influences that play upon the soul. 
He is a mystic, but a mystic whose passion it is 
to translate his vision into the practical lan- 
guage of to-day. 3 

He likes to call himself " The Apostle to the 
Outsiders," and seems to have a special message 
for those who, in place of any settled religious 
conviction, have only a vague sense of their 
souls' need for some spiritual food, a discon- 
tent with the stones that have been offered 
them by science or superstition when they have 
cried out for the bread of life. In the crowds 
that throng to hear him may be found, together 
with Catholic professors from the Lycees and 
Protestant pastors who come to gain fresh in- 
spiration for their own work, Russian Jews and 

s See Appendix " A." 



CHARLES WAGNER 101 

young artists from the Latin quarter, groups of 
students from the Sarbonne, men and women 
of the world and men and women who are out- 
casts from the world, — oppressed by a yearn- 
ing they cannot understand and a longing they 
cannot express — all drawn to this man who 
speaks to them " in the name of the inner 
voice." 

In his preaching there is no hint of that head- 
long zeal which rushes in upon some holy of 
holies and ruthlessly breaks the bruised reed 
that a human soul has leaned on. No smoking 
flax that has illumined though ever so faintly 
the darkness for some fellow creature will be 
quenched by his too zealous effort to fan it into 
sudden flame. In a spirit of reverence toward 
whatever has helped to lighten man's spiritual 
darkness, a reverence that is founded on the 
memory of those days when he himself was 
struggling toward the light, he makes his appeal 
to those vast deeps of spiritual emotion which 
lie below the surface at the heart of mankind. 
He would help men see God not primarily by 
the light of any outside authority, but by the 
light which shines in their own souls — that 
" light which never was on sea or land," which 
no astronomer's compass can discover, which 
no theology can imprison, but which is divinely 
sent to lighten every man that cometh into the 



102 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

world. While he would go as far as the scien- 
tist in his search for truth, he would go still 
farther, believing that religion alone can offer, 
in exchange for what science has contributed to 
the sum of human knowledge, that spiritual im- 
pulse without which life reverts to the purely 
scientific conception of a " cold and impotent 
aggregation of purposeless happenings." 
Drawing a sharp distinction between that 
" modest science which, recognizing its limita- 
tions affirms only what it knows, and the pre- 
tensions of that ignorance which would substi- 
tute itself for faith," he declares his conviction 
that " incalculable and irreparable loss would 
result if we suffered the richness of symbols and 
of ancient beliefs interpreted by the soul to be 
replaced by the mere products of rationalism 
alone or even by the most far-reaching results 
of positive knowledge." 

Positive knowledge has its limits. The 
realm of known facts has its boundary lines. 
u Thus far shalt thou go and no farther " is 
the word to which science and the human intel- 
lect must bow; but faith, that intuitive force of 
the soul, feels its way past the barriers that 
would shut it in or bar it out from the unknown. 
As the wings of a bird furnish it with the mys- 
terious power of flight which is one of the daily 
miracles that science is powerless to explain, so 



CHARLES WAGNER 103 

faith furnishes the human spirit with those 
wings on which in hours of suffering and temp- 
tation it rises above itself into a realm of peace 
which passes man's understanding, of love 
which passes his knowledge. In every age has 
blossomed the tree of human knowledge, but its 
most perfect fruit, grafted on it by the divinity 
within us and about us, has always been that 
faith in the Unseen which has made in very 
truth for the " healing of the nations." 

To ignore the sublime part that faith has 
played in shaping human destinies is to ignore 
the tremendous force of those laws of our in- 
ner natures, or our subconscious selves, of 
whose mysterious workings science has as yet 
only the faintest suspicion, but which control 
what we call spiritual life as unerringly as nat- 
ural laws control physical life. 

Charles Wagner feels that those people suf- 
fer an immense personal loss who, missing the 
uplift that comes from a vital sense of the di- 
vine Presence, are thus cheated out of that in- 
ner kingdom of peace that is theirs by divine 
right of their souls. 

" What shall we say," he cries, " to those who 
suffer, to those who weep, to those who die? 
Do you think you can give courage to the bro- 
kenhearted by telling them that some centuries 
hence humanity will perhaps be a little less mis- 



io 4 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

erable ? No, that is not sufficient. They need 
to be shown a touch of blue in their sky. Un- 
til you can teach men to sing a new song, they 
will still need to be comforted by the old song 
of infinite hope. The more man reasons, the 
more, in those hours of suffering when mystery 
engulfs and torments him, will he grow home- 
sick for what we call faith." 



APPENDIX "A" 

WAGNER'S DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES 

ENUNCIATED AT THE DEDICATION 

OF HIS NEW CHURCH 

Resolved to preserve amongst us the force which a 
living religion gives, we have associated ourselves to- 
gether to cultivate an ideal of life conformable to the 
practical needs and to the mentality of the time. 

We would not let anything be lost of the treasures 
of the past, nor neglect any of the new acquisitions. 
Persuaded that in the Spirit of Christ are found 
garnered the purest lights and most salutary powers of 
the soul, we consider it the one base on which a so- 
ciety can be built. We make it the corner-stone of 
our association. We call unto us all who are willing 
to try to live in this spirit, and we greet them as 
brothers, whatever be the difference in our doctrines. 

Leaving to each the freedom of his faith, and to 
God alone the judging of hearts, we respect and en- 
courage individual convictions as the best guarantees 
of progress in the truth, and we ask for unity, not to a 
uniform creed, but to the free consent of all good will 
directed toward the same end. 



105 



CHAPTER VIII 

USES AND ABUSES OF ITALIAN 
TRAVEL 

The reading public is growing somewhat 
restive under the ever-increasing output of rhap- 
sodies on Italy by professional litterateurs and 
artists. The world of these gifted creatures 
is so little our world and their language so un- 
like our language that we sometimes find our- 
selves wondering whether or not they are sin- 
cere, whether all the words they marshal so 
skilfully represent definite realities or are used 
merely to produce certain desirable literary 
effects. 

What that is real and valuable has Italy to 
give to the average man, to the artistically un- 
initiated, to those of us who are neither pro- 
fessionally enthusiastic over such matters nor 
constitutionally liable to those emotions which 
we are told we ought to feel ? 

To the average traveler, who in a few short 

months toils painfully and ignorantly through 

the galleries of Europe, there comes little but 

a weariness to the flesh and a drying of the 

1 06 



ITALIAN TRAVEL 107 

bones. There is no sadder sight even in Italy 
than to watch a horde of exhausted fellow- 
countrymen spending time, money, and splen- 
did American nervous force at this compara- 
tively valueless, pleasureless, and soulless 
grind. Perhaps the greatest benefit to be de- 
rived from such a trip is the sloughing off of 
that sense of inferiority which some of us are 
feeble enough to feel until we can say to our- 
selves: " At last, I have seen and touched the 
wonders of the world! " 

It is contended, and with much force, that 
one's first trip abroad is well spent in getting 
a bird's-eye view of Europe. But the qualify- 
ing fact should not be overlooked that the less 
a traveler tries to crowd into such a trip, the 
more he is likely to get out of it. How infin- 
itely better to receive a few distinct, delightful 
impressions than a blurred phantasmagoria of 
as nearly as possible everything that can be 
hurriedly scanned in a half dozen European 
countries ! Moreover, while virtually every 
one can be interested in London and amused in 
Paris, in the words of George William Curtis, 
" I begin to suspect that a man must have Italy 
and Greece in his heart and mind if he would 
see them with his eyes." 

Upon entering Italy every traveler is con- 
fronted by a question on his answer to which 



108 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

depends in large measure the success or failure 
of his trip. That question is, " What are you 
willing to omit? " Not in a lifetime can he 
see everything, and if his stay be limited to a 
few short months, he must be discriminating 
during those months or disappointed at the end 
of them. The most rational plan, therefore, 
would seem to be to devote approximately half 
the allotted time to one city in order to learn 
to know at least one small region intimately. 
With the insight into Italian life thus gained, 
the rest of the country ought to prove an open 
book which can be glanced through, even hur- 
riedly, with both delight and profit. 

Of course, when it comes to deciding which 
city shall thus be studied at leisure and made 
the key to the rest of Italy, one can only say, 
as did Schopenhauer when told that the Jews 
were God's favorite race, " Tastes differ." 
Venice rising from the sea clad in mystery and 
beauty, Venice with her unrivalled school of 
colorists, truly is a name to conjure with. On 
the other hand, from the standpoint of univer- 
sal history, present-day politics, and compara- 
tive art, Rome's advantages are incomparable. 
And then there is Florence, the home of Giotto 
and Dante, of Petrarch and Boccaccio, of Sa- 
vonarola and Michael Angelo ; Florence, whose 
language, history, and art are more truly and 



ITALIAN TRAVEL 109 

consistently Italian than those of any other 
centre of Italian life — Florence, the " Athens 
of Italy." Undoubtedly, it is to Florence one 
should go to find the most intimate and char- 
acteristic expression of the soul of Italy. 

On arriving in Florence one is apt at first to 
be not so much inspired as dazzled and bewil- 
dered by the art treasures on all sides. Every 
church, hospital, orphanage, monastery, or mu- 
nicipal building is crowded with priceless fres- 
coes and adorned with inimitable creations in 
marble and bronze. On every crumbling wall 
or ceiling, where to the early Italian or Renais- 
sance artists had been given a few square yards 
of available space, one is amazed to find the 
history of Israel, the life of St. Francis, or an 
entire system of philosophy presented with a 
dramatic power, an emotional intensity, and a 
beauty of coloring which make a direct appeal 
to the depths of one's being. As a rule, how- 
ever, during the first few days this appeal 
touches no responsive chord in the majority of 
people. The ideas expressed and the mental 
attitude involved belong to a bygone age. Be- 
fore the average man can come to have any real 
and proper appreciation of Mark Twain's 
" squint-eyed Madonnas," those primitive yet 
quaintly charming creations of the Byzantine 
and early Sienese schools, or even of the poetic 



no LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

productions of the Renaissance, he must rebuild 
in his imagination the mental world of those 
romantic epochs. This can be done most agree- 
ably by devoting one's hours of leisure to the 
perusal of the annals of old Florence, the leg- 
ends of her saints, the tales of her warriors and 
statesmen, the wild, bohemian lives of her art- 
ists, the marvelous history of her workmen 
guilds, the endless discussions of her various 
schools of philosophy, the " divine " and hu- 
man comedies of her poets, and the story of the 
life and death of her reformer-prophet, Savona- 
rola. 

The most valuable guidebook as a supple- 
ment to Baedeker is that of the late Grant Al- 
len. Mr. Allen had a sound historical sense 
and a contagious love of the beautiful. It is 
easy to forgive and overlook his pet foible — 
the desire to identify all the saints in every pic- 
ture. As a handbook, Kugler's " Italian 
Schools of Painting," having no competitors, 
is a necessary evil. But travelers today are 
particularly fortunate in possessing the illumi- 
nating little series of volumes, " Italian Paint- 
ers of the Renaissance," by Bernhard Beren- 
son. His books are of value in that they help 
one to understand the aesthetic significance of 
pictures and to enjoy their artistic beauties. 



ITALIAN TRAVEL in 

Lastly, there is Ruskin, the poet-pioneer in the 
study of Italian art. In spite of the small 
minds who rail at him because, coming before 
the development of modern scientific connois- 
seurship, his writings are full of technical er- 
rors, any one who voluntarily goes through 
Italy without the benefit of the flood of light 
he sheds on Italian art is on a par with a man 
who shuts his eyes to the light of day be- 
cause there are spots on the sun. 

With these writers and numerous lesser 
lights available for cicerones, as well as highly 
competent art lecturers who are more interest- 
ing and stimulating to the novice than any books 
can be, it is difficult to understand the willing- 
ness of so many travelers to limit themselves 
to the prosaic, not to say archaic, guidance of 
Baedeker. Unquestionably, the omnipresent, 
if not omniscient, Baedeker makes an invaluable 
servant, but I can affirm from experience that 
he is a worse than mediocre master. To his 
myriad disciples, however, on all matters from 
a knotty question in history to a judgment on 
art he is consulted as a final authority, and 
his asterisks are their guiding stars. Taking 
their mechanical way through the galleries, 
wearily checking off the numbers of the master- 
pieces, where he says, " let there be light," 



ii2 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

and puts two stars, there they pause and ad- 
mire, and where he puts no stars darkness 
reigns for them. 

A more serious blunder, however, than that 
of these conscientious " star-gazers " is made by- 
sightseers who, in their efforts to take a short 
cut to culture and see galleries wholesale, de- 
liver themselves up body and soul into the hands 
of the misinformation dispensers commonly 
called guides — those blind leaders of the blind 
for whom yawns the inevitable pit. 

The hordes of these misguiding creatures 
who haunt the museums, churches, and galleries 
of Europe are made up for the most part of the 
refuse of the more difficult or more crowded 
professions — disabled day-laborers, hotel- 
waiters out of a job, retired cab-drivers, or 
other unfortunates, who live not by their wits 
but by the traveling public's lack of wits. 

I once heard of a guide provided by a well- 
known tourist company at Paris who after hav- 
ing conducted a party two-thirds through one 
of the rooms at the Louvre, explaining about 
every fifth picture as he went, suddenly stopped, 
consulted some notes and said, " I beg pardon, 
you'll please retrace your steps — I've — er — 
made a slight mistake — I've explained the 
wrong side of the room." 



ITALIAN TRAVEL 113 

One afternoon, after a six months' stay in 
Florence, seizing the opportunity to rescue a 
friend from the clutches of a guide, I poured 
into his ears all my newly-acquired information. 
In brief outline I traced the slow development 
of Florentine art from the grotesque imitations 
of the stiff Byzantine up to the marvels of 
Michael Angelo, illustrating each step with the 
masterpieces of its epoch. It was amusing to 
see his look of sullen boredom and confused fa- 
tigue gradually giving way to manifestations of 
surprise, and finally of actual enjoyment. From 
the monstrous caricatures of the earliest 
Italian artists to the " Cimabue Madonna " at 
the Church of Santa Maria Novella evidently 
was a great stride, but the advent of Giotto was 
more; it was a revolution. His work marked 
the commencement of unimitative Italian art. 
Next, in the supremely brilliant and tragically 
short career of Masaccio came the dawn of the 
Florentine scientific school, with its steady de- 
velopment in the work of his successors, Paolo 
Uccello, Verrocchio, Castagno, Veneziano, Bal- 
dovinetti and Botticelli, and its maturity and 
consummate flower in the matchless creations 
of Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo. 

After a somewhat careful examination of 
these great masters, we went back to enjoy the 



ii 4 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

charming products of Fra Angelico, the Lippis, 
Benozzo Gozzoli, and others whose works, 
though full of gladness and subtle witchery, 
differ from those of the first-named in not con- 
stituting necessary links in the development of 
the Florentine school. While the story of this 
development is as simple as a nursery tale, it 
is many times more full of interest and value 
than are the accounts of wars, murders and in- 
trigues which form the warp and woof of so 
much meaningless " history." This record re- 
veals the human soul searching, struggling, and 
slowly achieving a fuller and more beautiful 
expression of its deepest emotions and loftiest 
aspirations. 

The statement, " I don't know anything 
about art, but I know what I like," is one 
which seems to come automatically to the lips 
of the uninitiated traveler on finding himself 
in the embarrassing situation of being called 
upon to discuss pictures with an artist or an 
art critic. These knowing creatures dread 
this little prefatory remark as much as a sea 
captain does that equally abused query of pas- 
sengers : " Captain, how many times have you 
crossed? " 

The story is related of a famous Scotch artist 
who, on hearing this artistic credo for about the 
hundredth time, said to the charming lady 



ITALIAN TRAVEL 115 

who had last offended: " Dinna say thot, 
Ma'am ! Dinna say thot — the beasts o' the 
field ken as mooch ! " 

Nevertheless, whatever professionals may 
say to the contrary, the attitude involved in 
this hackneyed phrase, " I don't know much 
about art, but I know what I like," is the only 
rational attitude for a beginner. It is a form 
of that mental honesty without which any real 
intellectual, spiritual, or aesthetic development 
is an utter impossibility. If one has even bad 
taste to start with and will work honestly, that 
taste can be cultivated. If, on the other hand, 
one merely goes into " mechanical raptures 
over known masterpieces," he can remain a life- 
time in Italy and memorize the names of all 
the great artists, together with the points of 
beauty of all the great pictures, without ever 
feeling a thrill of genuine aesthetic delight or 
receiving the slightest emotional uplift. The 
only possibility for real growth lies in being true 
to the highest that is in us, however low that 
may be. Therefore, the best advice that can 
be given a novice is, if Carlo Dolci's work is 
more beautiful to you than that of Botticelli, 
say so. Do not, however, stop at that; study 
the criticism of the world's great experts; try 
to look at Botticelli and Raphael and Michael 
Angelo from the standpoint of these critics ; try 



n6 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

to see the world of beauty they see and feel the 
emotional stimulus they feel. Eventually in 
this way you are certain to succeed in perceiv- 
ing the beauties to which your nature is capable 
of becoming responsive. Study Carlo Dolci 
and Guido Reni also from the point of view of 
the critic, and it is probable that soon their 
shortcomings will become apparent. By know- 
ing and enjoying without shame what you really 
like, yet ever striving to learn to like the best, 
and in no other way under heaven, is the devel- 
opment of your aesthetic nature possible. 

While I was standing one day before Botti- 
celli's " Birth of Venus," one of the most beau- 
tiful creations of the human imagination, a 
young American tourist and his wife came in. 
After a moment's inspection of the picture, the 
young woman made some remark about the 
" shameless " nude figure of Venus, whereupon 
they turned on their heels and stalked out. I 
could scarcely believe my senses. They had 
totally overlooked all the positive qualities of 
the picture. The fascinating expression of 
Renaissance feeling, of moral yearning, the 
stimulating movement of the figures and the 
marvelous decorative effect of color and line 
were totally lost on them. One thing and one 
alone they saw — the purely negative point 
that one of the figures had no clothes on. 



ITALIAN TRAVEL 117 

Their conception of art was on a par with that 
far too common conception of religion which 
holds up as a model the man who does not mur- 
der, nor commit adultery, nor steal illegally, 
nor get drunk, nor smoke, nor read the Sunday 
papers. Many of us, unfortunately, have for- 
gotten the fine virile religion of David, who 
committed all these crimes except the last, yet 
was called " a man after God's own heart " — 
because his aim was always pure and high and 
his repentance sincere when he fell, and because 
of his dominant positive qualities of courage, 
heroism, and self-sacrifice. In a virile art or a 
virile religion the positive qualities always as- 
sume a supreme importance. Both are in their 
decadence when the voice of the critic rises 
above that of the artist. 

Here the question arises : After one has stud- 
ied and enjoyed Italian art for a few months, 
what of it? Will a young man become a better 
and more successful citizen, a young girl a bet- 
ter wife and mother, for having seen and loved 
and partly understood this bewitching expres- 
sion of the soul of these past centuries? Will 
not such study put one out of sympathy with 
American life? Is it not something foreign 
to our spirit, and injurious in its influence? 
Perhaps an analogy will throw light on this 
question. Why do men who never intend to 



n8 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

make any possible practical use of higher math- 
ematics, logic or experimental physics, devote 
years of study to them and to kindred subjects 
at the university? Because such studies de- 
velop the powers of the mind, forming those 
mental habits of exactness and consecutiveness 
of thought without which any sustained intel- 
lectual power is impossible. Such studies per- 
meate and transform one's mental life — im- 
parting gradually and unconsciously the scien- 
tific spirit and method. Just so the fine arts, 
when truly loved and studied, saturate and 
transfuse one's entire personality, awake within 
one and gradually develop the aesthetic and 
emotional nature, and give to one's thoughts 
and work a new potency — the pervasive and 
persuasive sense of artistic feeling. When once 
this sense sometimes called taste, this feeling 
for beauty, is developed in a human soul, life 
is no longer the same; it has a new charm and 
power of fundamental importance. This de- 
velopment in one's nature, like the development 
in the mind of the scientific spirit or the awak- 
ening in the soul of the spiritual nature, hence- 
forth manifests itself, of necessity, in every 
manifestation of that personality. If one be 
a writer, it will gradually suffuse his work with 
a new and subtile power. If one be a farmer, 
it will transform his surroundings more and 



ITALIAN TRAVEL 119 

more into habitations worthy of a human be- 
ing. If one be an artisan, it will seek expres- 
sion in work that rises above the ugly and com- 
monplace. If one be a wife and mother, it 
will give to the home an attractiveness, a rest- 
fulness, a domestic charm, the value of which 
can scarcely be overestimated. In this way, 
far from unfitting one for life in America, it can 
but give to those who have really felt its influ- 
ence a new and mysterious force which, as it 
permeates more and more our national life, 
must dignify and exalt it. 

Here it must be acknowledged that some 
people on returning home from a trip abroad 
proceed at once to show their artistic attain- 
ments by carping at everything American and 
ostentatiously writhing in supersensitive horror 
at our art, industry, and life in general. It is 
their misfortune that travel has developed in 
them not a sensitiveness to see and enjoy what- 
ever is most picturesque and beautiful about 
them, but an abnormal ability to search out and 
suffer from everything that is crude or ugly. 
Their education has been entirely negative, 
their development has been one-sided and ludi- 
crous. This is not through any fault of Eu- 
rope. These same people have doubtless read 
the Bible and heard it expounded with the very 
similar result — that they have arrived at a re- 



120 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

ligious state of exaggerated and sanctimonious 
compunction over the sins of their neighbors. 
They look at everything in a shallow, egoistic 
way which makes it impossible for them to ap- 
preciate or imbibe the spirit which animates all 
great art — the spirit of truth and goodness 
expressed in terms of beauty. 

One fact of peculiar significance to Ameri- 
cans stands out large and luminous in the lives 
and work of all the great masters of Italy — 
the fact that supreme greatness is incompatible 
with hurry and fret. It took Orcagna ten years 
to make the incomparable marble canopy in 
the church of Or San Michele, and it took Ghi- 
berti twenty-one years to make the gates of the 
Baptistery at Florence, which Michael Angelo 
declared fit to be the " gates of Paradise." 
These men demanded only a living and a chance 
to do their best work, but that gave them im- 
mortality. The highest work never has been 
and never will be done by men who do their 
work primarily for the money they can get out 
of it rather than for the message they can 
breathe into it. Men whose time is too valua- 
ble to work and work over their conceptions 
and wait for a new inspiration must turn out 
hack-work, a loveless, unnatural product of 
hand and brain which, however perfect in tech- 
nique, is yet a monstrosity. None but mes- 



ITALIAN TRAVEL 121 

sages from the heart have ever touched and 
inspired the hearts of men. 

One other thing we can learn from Europe, 
which unfortunately Europe has not yet learned 
for herself, and that is the uselessness and ut- 
ter absurdity of seeking lasting satisfaction or 
happiness in even the highest aesthetic delights, 
except as infused into and made a part of one's 
serious duties and labors as a human being. 
Beauty is the expression of one's love for his 
work. What we love we instinctively adorn. 
A decoration is an embodied caress. But no 
art can replace ethical purpose, no skill can 
sanctify a selfish or impure impulse. The cen- 
ter and core of life is a love for truth, and 
goodness, and for that beauty which is their 
radiant garment. Art exercises an influence 
which is beneficent and can be replaced by noth- 
ing else; but when, as among the believers in 
" art for art's sake," the attempt is made to 
make of art a religion, it would be disgusting 
if it were not so ridiculous; and yet one can 
hardly say it is ridiculous, it is so supremely 
pitiful. 



CHAPTER IX 
A REVISED VERSION OF VENICE 

On the train going to Venice our compart- 
ment was occupied by a heterogeneous com- 
pany of tourists thrown into a juxtaposition 
which typified curiously enough the contrast 
that existed between their differing points of 
view. 

A couple of college girls bubbling over with 
enthusiasm and scarcely able to wait for their 
first ecstatic glimpse of Venice were seated op- 
posite two English women who were exhausted 
and blase from the strain of six months' indis- 
criminate sightseeing, while a pleasant, matter- 
of-fact looking American business man, who 
had got separated from his Cook's party and 
whose one idea of travel seemed to be to " do " 
a city or a country as fast as possible and " be 
done with it," was discussing his methods of 
sightseeing with a plodding German tourist in- 
tent on seeing the whole of Italy with a micro- 
scope. My vis-a-vis was a well-known art pro- 
fessor in one of our girls' colleges, who had a 
habit of saturating herself afresh every year 

122 



REVISED VERSION OF VENICE 123 

with the spirit of her favorite old Venetian 
masters. Here, also, was contrast, for I had 
seen Venice only once before, and that in such 
a fleeting and cursory manner that Titian, Tin- 
toret, and Georgione were merely so many 
names to me. 

In the gondola which the American business 
man, the two college girls, and myself took for 
the hotel, where we all happened to be booked, 
I remarked casually that my husband had pro- 
posed to me in Venice to the accompaniment of 
that same Santa Lucia which came floating up 
to us from a group of musicians nearby. " I 
don't blame him," one of the girls replied with 
crushing candor, as she caught her first glimpse 
of the minarets of San Marco. " A man isn't 
responsible for what he does here. There is 
something irresistible about this mixture of 
music and moonlight." 

Venice was at her best that night, and as we 
glided along the Grand Canal past the shining 
palaces that rose out of the water to greet us, all 
our preconceived notions and prejudices, all our 
differing points of view, were forgotten, and 
we yielded to the spell of the place as to some 
law of nature. Indeed, for the moment it 
seemed but a part of the natural order of things 
— to be sped over moonlit waters by a gon- 
dolier who might have been a grand opera 



i2 4 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

singer, to a hotel which had once been in fact 
the home of a doge. Even our Cook's tourist 
seemed to feel that he was no longer in the 
dreary world of sightseeing but in a land of 
enchantment, and I found myself wondering if 
the cultivated ennui of the much-traveled Eng- 
lish ladies would be able to survive the shock of 
this dazzling vision of Venice. 

Ever since my first visit, when Cupid so ban- 
daged my eyes that the city of Desdemona 
served only as a background for my own 
romance, I had been looking forward to this 
opportunity to come back soberly, put on a pair 
of prosaic spectacles and see Venice according 
to the best lights that have been lit for modern 
tourists. To this end I had brought with me 
a number of books to help unlock for me the 
city's treasures. Ruskin I had selected for the 
old school of art and for the spiritual insight he 
gives; Berenson for the new school, with its 
scientific method and philosophic treatment; 
Grant Allen for his splendid grasp of the devel- 
opment of Venetian art; Kugler's " Italian 
Schools of Painting " for reference; Taine and 
Gautier for French sidelights they cast, and 
Mrs. Oliphant for bits of ancient gossip to 
deepen local colors. 

The third night after our arrival the art 
teacher dined with the college girls and myself, 



REVISED VERSION OF VENICE 125 

and I recall her lament that with the wealth of 
suggestive books at hand so many tourists 
should yet be content to follow Baedeker's 
stars as their guiding stars, and by thus limiting 
themselves to second-hand impressions, lose all 
the zest of a real personal experience. Warm- 
ing up to her subject, she went on to compare 
travelers who substitute Baedeker's word for 
the witness of their own hearts with those per- 
sons in the religious world whose convictions 
are all borrowed, and whose adherence is to a 
belief based on some outside authority rather 
than to a faith founded on their own experience. 
Just as she was concluding, our matter-of-fact 
compatriot paused on his way out of the dining- 
room and announced complacently that he was 
off for Rome the next day. He had actually 
covered most of the ground mapped out by 
Baedeker for a four-days' trip, and I confess 
that the accurate and business-like way in which 
he had disposed of about three-fourths of the 
sights compelled a certain admiration even on 
the part of the art teacher. At the same time, 
by serving as a concrete illustration of the point 
she had just made, his example encouraged me 
in my resolve not to attempt to swallow Venice 
whole, but, on the contrary, to try taking my 
art as I take my food — slowly, with a ten- 
dency toward " Fletcherizing." 



126 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

The next morning, on my way to the church 
of St. John and St. Paul I looked up the little 
bas-relief of St. George killing the dragon 
which Ruskin cites as " the topmost example of 
the sculpture art of Venice," but which on my 
previous visit I had not considered worth my 
attention. In the square before the church, 
coming suddenly on the Colleoni monument, 
probably the noblest equestrian statue in the 
world, I had a guilty recollection of having ac- 
corded it formerly only a passing glance. 
" Think of it," I said to myself reproachfully, 
" Verrocchio, Leonardo's master, put years of 
his life and the very essence of his genius into 
the design of this statue, and I, having come 
some thousands of miles presumably to see the 
best that Italy had to show, merely stood for 
a second or two staring at the horse's tail, with- 
out having the curiosity or taking the time to go 
around the statue and see the rider's face ! " 

With a mental apology to Verrocchio, Colle- 
oni, and Italy, I crossed the square to the 
Church where so many knights and doges lie 
buried, and where in tracing the rise and de- 
cline of the art of monumental sculpture in 
Venice one gets such interesting sidelights on 
the lives and characters of the Venetians. 
First I examined the early Gothic tomb of a 
fourteenth-century knight with his arms folded 



REVISED VERSION OF VENICE 127 

and his sword by his side, sleeping the sleep of 
death. Above, under Gothic niches, Mark 
and Peter, patron saints of Venice and of the 
knight, stood guard over the dead, while two 
saintly little personages bearing censers gazed 
tenderly at the central figure of the Madonna, 
holding aloft that little child born in Bethle- 
hem who had opened up the way of life. It 
was a peaceful scene, and one could imagine 
that for this soldier saint, with his sword in its 
scabbard and the emblems of his faith about 
him, death had no terrors. 

I then passed on to some later tombs of the 
early Renaissance, where the designs were more 
elaborate and the angels were more perfectly 
carved, but which still breathed the same spirit 
of love the artist had in his work and of faith 
in the truth he was representing. In the work 
of the later Renaissance, however, with its in- 
creased boastfulness of design and faultlessness 
of execution, one has the feeling that the artists 
were beginning to care so much more for the 
fame of setting up a statue than for the joy of 
making it or for the truth they were expressing 
by it that the soul of the work was lost. They 
made more ornate things, it is true, more per- 
fect things from a purely technical standpoint, 
but never after such wholly beautiful things. 
As Ruskin says, " In old times men used their 



128 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

powers of painting to show the objects of faith; 
in later times they used the objects of faith 
that they might show their powers of paint- 
ing." Thus the Magdalen in whom the ear- 
lier artists and sculptors had seen a woman who 
loved much because she had been much for- 
given, and who came with her most precious 
ointment to anoint her Saviour's feet, became 
for the artists of the Renaissance an excuse to 
paint a voluptuous woman with only her empty 
bottle of ointment to help one divine who she 
is. 

The earlier warriors who lay themselves 
down so serenely in the sleep of death are suc- 
ceeded in a later age by warriors impatient of 
that sleep. These will have none of the trap- 
pings of death about them ; they ignore the very 
nature of the tomb. The angel of the Annun- 
ciation and the shrinking Madonna make way 
for classical subjects — Hercules, with the 
Lion and the Hydra and groups of bombastic 
Virtues — Virtues which unfortunately were 
as conspicuously absent in the lives of the later 
Venetians as they are flauntingly present on 
their tombs. No longer content to lie down 
in their sleep, these knights stand upright on 
their tombs ; in later sculptures they even mount 
their horses and brandish their swords, riding 
over their own ashes, as it were, defying death. 



REVISED VERSION OF VENICE 129 

Ah ! it seems to me the earlier artists were 
nearer the truth; better far, they thought, when 
death comes, submit to it like a man, lie down 
and sleep and trust God for the waking, since 
all the prancing horses and gilded trappings 
and brandished swords cannot make death any 
the less real or solemn or inevitable. 

From the early part of the seventeenth cen- 
tury the way of Venetian sculpture seemed all 
down hill — to judge from the examples of 
florid eighteenth-century work that flaunt them- 
selves in this church — coarse, overgrown an- 
gels, like ballet girls, drawing heavy curtains 
from gaudy tombs that revealed a perfect 
menagerie of lions, genii, winged Mercuries, 
over-dressed dogearesses and under-dressed 
nymphs in profusion and confusion. 

From the tombs I turned to the pictures and 
lingered before the wistfully beautiful group 
by Lorenzo Lotto, " St. Antonius Giving 
Alms." Painting toward the close of that first 
period of the Renaissance, which symbolized 
youth with its joy in the beauty of life and its 
radiant self-sufficiency, Lotto shadowed forth in 
his art the period of maturity, when, with some 
of youth's visions faded, some illusions gone, 
man begins to feel the need of a greater 
strength than his own, and there comes a reach- 
ing out after the faith of his childhood which 



i 3 o LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

his youth had thought it could put away. In 
this picture one feels the new human impulse 
of the time, a yearning after something higher 
than man's highest, a hint that perhaps, after 
all, to help suffering in others is the best way 
to lighten one's own, and that the lost path 
back to God may lie through service of one's 
fellows. 

On our way home we stopped for a few min- 
utes to look at the sculptured angels above the. 
door of the " furniture store," formerly St. 
Theodore's Scuolo, which Ruskin takes as one 
of the texts for his arraignment of the kind of 
modern sculpture that stretches every muscle 
for show and has ceased to reverence faith, 
hope, and love, either as emblems on its tombs 
or as realities in its life. People smile at some 
of Ruskin's excesses of sarcasm, but with these 
illustrations close at hand it hardly seems pos- 
sible for any one to ignore the great gulf which 
stretches between the works of those whose rul- 
ing passion is fame and fortune at any cost, and 
those who follow the inner light, who 

"... work for the joy of the working, 

Each in his separate star; 
Drawing the thing as he sees it 

For the God of things as they are." 

Fame inevitably comes to, or rather, as is 



REVISED VERSION OF VENICE 131 

oftener the case, follows after the real artist, 
who must have genius of soul as well as of in- 
tellect; but the fame is not his concern, and if 
he makes it his concern, the best part of his 
work, the soul of it, that alone which is capable 
of immortality, is lost. Everywhere it is true 
that only he who loses his life shall find it, 
only he who loses all ruling thought of fame 
shall in the end attain it. This is the lesson 
one learns in contrasting the academic pictures 
of Ghirlandaio and Guido Reni with the works 
of Fra Angelico, who painted on his knees, and 
the early pictures of Raphael before, spoiled by 
adulation, he lost his vision. The first artists 
sacrificed the highest in them to at least a lower, 
and their fame, such as it is, was bought with 
a part of their soul. The fame of the others 
is as the afterglow of their soul's achievement 
— the glory that lingers in the heavens when 
the sun has set. 

That evening I read Browning's analysis 
of Andrea Del Sarto, he whom men called the 
" faultless painter," who yet fell so far short 
of his highest — that place " side by side with 
Agnolo " — a genius who had his vision but not 
the courage of his vision. Genius is not given 
to many, but to each man is vouchsafed a vision. 
The star that of old led the wise men still shines 
for souls today, and to every man that comes 



i 3 2 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

into the world there is given an inner light by 
which he may discern his highest. Stars differ 
from each other in glory and mountains in 
height, and one man's highest is higher than 
another's, but the secret of each man's highest 
is between himself and God. To fall short 
of that highest is to make the great refusal, the 
only possible failure. 

On my first visit to Venice I would have dis- 
dained to spend a whole morning on one church 
and a few stray pictures, as it had never oc- 
curred to me up to that time to distinguish be- 
tween the relative values of the comparatively 
little one might see with some intelligent appre- 
ciation, and the immense quantity one might 
see in a slipshod way. 

On my return home from that trip, the dis- 
covery that a friend who had never been abroad 
had yet a much more intimate knowledge of It- 
aly than I, made me realize how much better it 
may be, after all, " to be able to appreciate 
beautiful things and not have them, than to have 
them and not foe able to appreciate them." 
Gradually it dawned on me that the same truth 
applies to Italy in particular as to life in gen- 
eral — what you take out depends largely on 
what you put in. 

The fact of having worn out a certain amount 
of shoe leather in European art galleries does 



REVISED VERSION OF VENICE 133 

not necessarily imply that one has gained any 
culture thereby. Not infrequently it happens, 
as witness the case of my travel-stained self 
and my untraveled friend, that a person by 
studying at home the art of Italy, and through 
her art those ideals which have moulded her 
history and been the guiding genius of her 
people, may catch something of the spirit of 
the old masters into his life and thus learn the 
secret of Italy's heart, which is hid from many 
who have only seen her face. 

Having a luncheon engagement with the art 
teacher and the two college girls, I had just 
time before the appointed hour for a ride down 
the Grand Canal which Gautier says "is an 
immense gallery open to the sky, where from 
the depths of a gondola one can study the art 
of seven or eight centuries — the Byzantine, 
the Saracen, the Lombard, the Gothic, the Ro- 
man, the Greek, and even the Rococo — the 
massive pillar and the slender column, the 
pointed arch and the rounded arch, the whim- 
sical capital full of birds and flowers come from 
Acre or Jaffa, and the Greek Capital found in 
the ruins of Athens." 

Here one may dream of that far-off day 
when Venice was queen of the sea, and the na- 
tions of the earth brought as tribute their gold, 
frankincense, and myrrh — all the glory of 



i 3 4 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

Greek form and Oriental color, of Roman 
strength and Gothic grace, which she wrought 
into her dwellings before, like the ancient city 
of Babylon, she " was consumed in her palace 
among the nations." 

Some one has called the Grand Canal the real 
" book of gold " of Venice, " where all the 
Venetian nobility have signed their names upon 
a monumental facade. " Most of these ancient 
names have faded, but others have been added 
not unworthy to replace them — Browning, 
Wagner, Ruskin, Byron, and many others 
whose genius or whose talents make them more 
notable than the vast majority of the Venetian 
nobility. 

But even in the early days her nobles were 
not the only citizens who shed luster on Venice, 
for the Bellinis were of a humble peasant fam- 
ily, Tintoret was the son of a dyer, and one 
faded fresco on the outside of a crumbling pal- 
ace wall still hints dimly of the time when Ven- 
ice counted Titian and Georgione among her 
" house painters." 

We took our lunch at a famous little Bo- 
hemian restaurant on a side street near St. 
Mark's, and while waiting for the proprietor- 
chef to cook the steak, which we had selected 
off the counter, and the soupe aux piddochi, a 
classic dish of Venice, we stepped into the at- 



REVISED VERSION OF VENICE 135 

rium of St. Mark's to glance at those naive 
Old Testament mosaics which give one the feel- 
ing that Adam and Eve and Noah and the ani- 
mals must literally have sat for their portraits 
to the Byzantine artists who contrived to 
breathe so much genuine knowledge of human 
nature into their childlike efforts. 

As we followed with breathless interest the 
story of our first parents, I understood the re- 
mark of a friend who insisted she never could 
forgive the Higher Criticism for robbing her 
of Adam and Eve ! There is a note of solemn 
joy in the quaint conception of that first wed- 
ding morn when the bride is given away by 
God the Father — and we were genuinely dis- 
tressed to see Eve picking the fatal apple so 
soon afterward. In order to settle the blame 
once and for all time on her woman's shoulders, 
the artist (with more historic accuracy than 
magnanimity of spirit) has twice represented 
her in the act of offering the forbidden fruit to 
Adam. Adam, having finished eating his half 
of the apple, makes haste to tell on Eve, where- 
upon God chides them very sorrowfully and 
they kneel down, Eve meekly, Adam abjectly, 
to receive their sentence of punishment. After 
they have risen, God presents them with gar- 
ments. Eve, rather pleased than otherwise 
with her new clothes, is dressed first and stands 



136 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

waiting for Adam, who has great difficulty in 
drawing on his shirt and finally has to be as- 
sisted by Deity. When they are ready to leave 
Paradise, they are not expelled by a furious 
angel with a fiery sword, as in later pictures, 
but are led to the gate by God himself, who, 
laying His hand gently on their shoulders as if 
in benediction, sends them forth. 

Even in this solemn moment Eve seems curi- 
ous and talkative, straining her eyes to see how 
the world looks outside the gates and vainly 
trying to reassure Adam, who looks dubious as 
to the future and sullen about the past. In the 
last scene, however, Adam comes out well. 
His punishment has been turned to the divine 
account and he is joyfully subduing the earth 
while Eve sits close by with her work, sewing 
for the baby. They have " made it up " with 
each other and by the perfect peace and joy 
of the scene we know they have made it up like- 
wise with God. 

Beyond in the atrium we caught glimpses of 
other Old Testament scenes. One mosaic we 
noticed which depicted in most realistic fashion 
Noah pushing and one of his sons pulling a 
reluctant lion into the Ark — but just at this 
point a little urchin, despatched from the res- 
taurant, came rushing up to tell us our piddochi 
was getting cold, so we left Adam and Eve to 



REVISED VERSION OF VENICE 137 

their hoeing and sewing and went to eat our 
lunch, which we too, we felt, had earned that 
day by the sweat of our brows. 

We then devoted an hour to the Academy 
where Carpaccio, perhaps the best after-dinner 
story-teller of the Renaissance, held us spell- 
bound with his quaintly charming series of pic- 
tures illustrating the life and vicissitudes of St. 
Ursula and her ten thousand virgin compan- 
ions. 

I squandered very little time buying lace and 
glass in Venice this second trip, for it had finally 
dawned on me that while I could get Venetian 
glass and lace in many American cities, never 
again in any other place than Venice could I 
have such an opportunity to see Tintoret, and 
in him Venetian painting at its high-water mark, 
with what was most real in religion, deepest in 
poetry, and loveliest in art all combined. One 
of his paintings in the Scuolo de San Rocco, 
adjoining his Parish Church, is to me as deeply 
moving a picture as I have ever seen. Who 
that has looked on it can ever forget that white- 
stoled figure standing before Pilate with bound 
hands and the look of a conqueror? Yet for 
all the Godlike calm of His face there is a feel- 
ing of infinite human weariness about the fig- 
ure, strange mingling of a man crushed and a 
God triumphant — a God who could only con- 



1 38 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

quer by suffering and a man who dared to suf- 
fer like a God. Opposite sits Pilate in his 
royal robes of state, surrounded by all the pomp 
and splendor of imperial Rome. No hint of 
shrinking, you might say, in that figure, and 
yet, as you look beneath the glittering surface, 
piercing through the body to the naked soul of 
him, the man seems literally to dwindle before 
your eyes until by some subtle swift play of 
inner vision the masks drop from the figures 
and the scene is changed — Pilate is the con- 
demned one and Christ stands forth the judge. 
There is a great pity in Christ's eye as He 
looks upon Pilate washing his hands. Can the 
man really believe that water will wash away 
the stain? What pitiful superstitions are peo- 
ple bound by, what meaningless rites suffice 
them, how shallow the Pilate creed! Ah, 
standing there with the weight of the world's 
sin crushing Him, Christ knows that the ruler's 
saying, " I wash my hands of this," will not do 
away with the least atom of responsibility. 
About to pour out His blood in token of re- 
generation, to teach the world the law of sacri- 
fice, He knows that easy-going formulas are 
not enough, that water does not suffice, that 
without shedding of blood is no remission. 
One may not turn on the faucet of this or that 
church, or trust that some man-made creed or 



REVISED VERSION OF VENICE 139 

priestly rite will save him. No, one's life must 
be devoted to a divine purpose, one's material 
interests must be subordinated to spiritual ends. 
We feel instantly, on looking at this picture, 
that the sadness in Christ's face is not for 
Himself. The small moment of personal 
agony, of shrinking in Gethsemane, is over. 
He is thinking of the ignorant mob outside 
shouting, "Crucify Him!" — yes, Him, their 
King; of the fleeing disciples who had been so 
long time with Him and yet had never known 
Him; of Peter who is denying Him as the cock 
crows; of Judas who has betrayed Him; of 
Pilate who, in order to remain the friend of 
Caesar, at last condemns the Christ. He seems 
to be speaking now to Pilate — Pilate the pup- 
pet, who dreams he is the judge : " Thou couldst 
have no power at all against me, except it were 
given thee from above." Ah, the judgment 
scene is not here, not now ! A few hours ago, 
alone in the garden, the real judgment had been 
passed. When He refused to call for the le- 
gion of angels to deliver Him, and stretched 
out His hand only to the one who brought the 
cup, He Himself gave Pilate the power with 
which to judge Him now. " No man taketh 
my life from Me," the words come ringing 
down the centuries and Tintoret has caught 
their echo : " No man taketh my life from 



i 4 o LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have 
power to lay it down and I have power to take 
it again." 

Christ before Pilate! Pilate before Christ! 
Either phrase might serve as the title for this 
picture, and yet neither is entirely adequate, 
for in the final analysis both figures seem to 
stand so terribly alone — each weighing not 
the other's but his own soul in the balance — 
type of that inevitable, inexorable judgment 
which every man must pass on his own life. 
We cry out to God for mercy and he hands us 
the scales. By the choice we have made of 
light or darkness, of our highest or our lowest, 
we pronounce upon ourselves that judgment 
which alone is final. 

Looking back on those days in the sea city, 
it seems to me that if only he have the mind 
to, one may " go to church " to as good pur- 
pose in voluptuous Venice as in Puritan New 
England; may hear, if he have ears to hear, a 
still small voice speaking from pictured lips 
and find the deathless truths of religion wrought 
into lifeless marble. Before I left Venice this 
second time, though I had by no means covered 
all the ground I had hoped to, I had at least 
caught a glimpse of something of which Bae- 
deker makes no mention — something that 
cannot be seen or appreciated mechanically, 



REVISED VERSION OF VENICE 141 

and that is the spirit of the dying city, of which 
the splendor of her past and the magic of her 
present are but the more or less inadequate 
material expressions. 

To the discerning traveler there is a more 
delightful experience than a first visit to Ven- 
ice, and that is a second; and a still more de- 
lightful experience, and that is a third. Indeed, 
it was easy for me to understand, after having 
seen the enthusiasm of the art teacher, the 
charm there might be in taking a possible thirty- 
third degree. Such is the spell of the place that 
before you have seen Venice, she lures you in 
your dreams ; and once seen, she haunts you ever 
after. 



CHAPTER X 

THE ASSISI OF ST. FRANCIS AND 
SABATIER 

A well-known guide book prefaces its de- 
scription of one of the historic old towns near 
Venice with the illuminating observation that 
it is like no other city in Italy. This remark 
might apply with almost equal force to prac- 
tically all the other Italian cities, for each of 
them, whether it be large or small, has a dis- 
tinct personality. On the other hand, just as 
a group of children who are quite unlike each 
other in looks and character may yet have some- 
thing in common which stamps them as mem- 
bers of the same family, so the cities of Italy, 
though they differ from each other as widely 
as do the mountains of Assisi from the lagoons 
of Venice, still manifest a certain family like- 
ness in their power to charm. Each appeals 
to you in a different way, but each ends by fas- 
cinating you. 

Rome is masterful, it overpowers you; Ven- 
ice enchants you; Assisi inspires you; Florence 

142 



THE ASSISI OF ST. FRANCIS 143 

possesses you. And so I might go on, calling 
out what seems to me the dominant note struck 
by the different localities, for this great or- 
chestra of Italy, in which the different cities 
play the different parts, has the power to pitch 
its music in many keys, to transpose its melodies 
to charm all ears. 

Assisi, like her great basilica, is built. in lay- 
ers with some houses nestling comfortably at 
her feet in the valley, others clinging to the 
sides of the hill like children catching at their 
mother's dress, and still others balancing them- 
selves on tiptoe up against the edge of the cliff 
in such a precarious position that one expects 
at any minute to see them relax and tumble 
over from sheer strain of exhaustion. When I 
learned, however, that the house I was espe- 
cially worried about bore the historic date of 
1492, I felt considerably reassured as to its 
staying qualities. 

As some one has said, " Perugia is the most 
queenly looking of all the Umbrian hill cities, 
while Assisi across the way looks like a poor 
relation." But if Assisi is poor in fortune and 
in aspect, she is rich in traditions of blood and 
of history. Travelers who rate luxurious ho- 
tel accommodations above high art, and who 
can better appreciate a good table d'hote than 
the character of St. Francis, probably will con- 



i 4 4 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

tinue to stay in Perugia and drive over some 
pleasant morning to " do " Assisi in a few 
hours. But those who, having gone to Italy 
to drink deep of her art and inspiration, are 
unwilling to turn away empty from this one of 
her rarest feasts, will filch from more preten- 
tious sights some few days at least for this lit- 
tle wayside village. Assisi doubly deserves to 
be a place of pilgrimage, for here on the walls 
of her basilica one can trace the rise and de- 
velopment of Italian art from its earliest grop- 
ings after form and expression in the archaic 
frescoes before Cimabue, to its great flowering 
time in Giotto and its later blossoming in the 
exquisite creations of Simone Martini and other 
Sienese masters; and here, likewise, one may 
tread on sacred ground hallowed for all time 
because in this valley some seven centuries 
ago St. Francis was born, first of the flesh, 
then of the spirit, and here preached and lived 
his triple gospel of love for God, man and 
nature. So closely did he follow in his Mas- 
ter's footsteps, it seemed in truth the Christ 
had come again; only this time, the legend 
runs, the angels were heard singing out the glad 
tidings in Assisi instead of Bethlehem; and 
there is a church now where it is said the heav- 
enly voices sang, and a chapel covers the spot 
where the young St. Francis lay. 



THE ASSISI OF ST. FRANCIS 145 

But this idyllic conception of Assisi unfor- 
tunately is based on only a part of the truth. 
If one stays long enough in Italy to look a lit- 
tle deeper than the surface, one is apt to sicken 
of legends and weary of saints, for almost 
every town contains some wonder-working cru- 
cifix, and costly shrines are forever being 
erected over miraculous relics, while half- 
starved peasants take bread from their chil- 
dren's mouths in order to deck the statue of the 
Madonna with paper flowers and waxen images. 
Assuredly the great basilica where St. Francis 
is buried and the gaudy church that covers the 
place where he died, lying on the bare stones 
in the arms of his " bride, poverty," seem 
rather to stifle than to express the message 
of the man whose life was one long pro- 
test against the pomp and luxury of the church 
and all the complex creeds and dogmas which 
during so many centuries it had been spinning 
into a shroud to adorn the body and hide the 
spirit of its divine Founder. But though many 
of the haunts of St. Francis have been dese- 
crated rather than consecrated, nevertheless 
this fair Umbrian country still remains his 
country — " the best document from which to 
study the early Franciscans." Here Nature is 
ever the same, and they who will listen may 
learn the message of love which she spoke to 



146 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

him through the perfume of the flowers, the 
murmur of the brook and the sighing of the 
winds. Here one may climb to the Carceri 
and see the cave in the hillside where he kept 
so many holy vigils ; the flowers along the road 
are the descendants of those " little sister flow- 
ers " he loved, and the birds singing in the 
great trees are like the very ones he preached 
to so many centuries ago. 

St. Francis was a spiritual genius. What 
Shakespeare was among dramatists and Plato 
among philosophers, what Caesar was among 
world conquerors and Michael Angelo among 
artists, Francis of Assisi was among saints. 
Born of wealthy parents, up to the age of 
twenty-four he lived the idle, luxurious life of 
his class and time. But at this stage in his ca- 
reer, suddenly experiencing one of those psy- 
chological revolutions called conversions, he 
threw himself into the service of the higher 
life with a whole-hearted devotion which had 
not been equalled since the days of the early 
church. His entire nature was changed. 
Henceforth his whole being seemed charged 
with a spiritual power which enabled him 
during the few remaining years of his life 
to exercise over the hearts and minds of men 
a religious influence more potent than that ex- 
erted by all the priests and popes of his time. 



THE ASSISI OF ST. FRANCIS 147 

Unlike his contemporary, St. Dominic, he laid 
little emphasis on intellectuality and much on 
the value of physical labor for his disciples. 
By combining the gospel of hard work with that 
of poverty, chastity and obedience, he made of 
his order a species of Salvation Army of the 
thirteenth century. He utterly refused to be 
hampered by any of the so-called helps of ma- 
terial wealth. Like David rejecting Saul's ar- 
mor, he cast aside all the ordinary ecclesiastical 
weapons and, going forth armed only with an 
unconquerable love and a few simple truths, 
smote the giant evils of his age and left upon 
his own and succeeding generations a deep and 
enduring impression. 

Through friends we had heard of Signor 
Rossi, the delightful and scholarly proprietor 
of the quaint little hotel in Assisi, and of his 
choice private library of French, English, Ger- 
man and Italian books which he places at the 
disposal of guests. Indeed, the bohemian tone 
of his hotel, in which was to be found a 
judicious mixture of artistic confusion, liter- 
ary abandon and general happy-go-luckiness, 
proved that mine host was more of a scholar 
than hotel-manager. The real manager of the 
place was a boy of about fifteen. Lads of this 
age, got up in long trousers and cut-away coats 
with flapping tails, are a feature in small Ital- 



148 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

ian hotels where they are intended to convey 
the appearance of age and receive the wages of 
youth. Michael Angelo, as this Assisi boy 
was called, was almost as versatile as his name- 
sake. He knew enough of three languages to 
form some confused notion of the needs of the 
various guests and filled to the brim the posi- 
tions of assistant cook, interpreter, porter and 
bootblack. 

We might never have appreciated so keenly 
his merits if he had not been laid low for three 
days with a fever, during which period the 
whole machinery of the hotel came to a stand- 
still in spite of the scholarly efforts of the pro- 
prietor, assisted by his demoralized corps of 
guests and domestics. But pilgrims to Assisi 
must be content to forego certain creature com- 
forts in order to enjoy for a season the rare 
and never-to-be-forgotten charms of the place. 
A Yale professor whom we met there confided 
to us that though on the first day his wife and 
daughter declared they could never put up with 
the primitive accommodations and shiftless 
management, they were leaving, after three 
idyllic weeks, with tears of regret. We went 
to Assisi for four days and it was a victory of 
sheer will-power that we tore ourselves away 
in four weeks. 

The first evening at dinner we found our- 



THE ASSISI OF ST. FRANCIS 149 

selves seated near a man who at once riveted 
our attention by the force and charm of his 
personality. In his conversation, at times 
grave, at times sparkling with that indefinable 
quality which the French call " esprit" there 
was always an undercurrent of profound rever- 
ence which one instinctively recognized as the 
characteristic of a spirit that, even while it 
played most lightly on the surface, was yet 
buoyed up by the deeps. Seeing him at first 
seated, we did not realize his shortness of stat- 
ure. 1 We were conscious only of his lion-like 
head and strangely luminous eyes, that glowed 
and burned and hinted of the imprisoned splen- 
dor of the soul they reflected. When he 
spoke of St. Francis, instantly we knew who he 
was. Only a man who had written as had 
Paul Sabatier of St. Francis could speak of him 
as did this stranger. 

M. Sabatier, though a Frenchman, divides 
his time almost equally between Italy and 
France. The influence he exerts in both coun- 
tries by means of his lectures, books and maga- 

1 Owing to the unusual largeness of M. Sabatier's head 
and the shortness of his stature, when the degree of LL.D. 
was conferred upon him at Oxford, a few years ago, he was 
obliged, much to the amusement of the students, to hold up 
the University gown in one hand to keep it from dragging, 
and in his other hand to carry the cap, which was several 
sizes too small for his head. 



ISO LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

zine articles, as well as by his wide personal 
acquaintance with a host of young priests and 
writers, makes him a powerful factor in that 
vast movement toward religious freedom, so- 
cial progress, and political reform which has 
come to be the world-wide passion of the ideal- 
ists of this generation. 

I am sure many people who come to Assisi 
leave with more vivid recollections of M. Saba- 
tier than of Giotto's frescoes. In thinking 
of St. Francis the image of the saint somehow 
gets confounded with that of his brilliant biog- 
rapher, so that to speak of the one means to 
remember the other. But surely this is as it 
should be, for the saint who after all these 
centuries has been given back to the world in 
his own native sweetness and light ought cer- 
tainly today to be associated in our minds with 
the scholar who has devoted his splendid tal- 
ents and consecrated so many years of his life 
to this labor of love. 

M. Sabatier has done a great work for the 
inhabitants of Assisi, most of whom seem to 
have followed the example of their gentle saint 
and taken poverty as their bride and constant 
companion. Although not an orthodox so- 
cialist, he has many socialistic ideas, among 
which is a disbelief in haphazard charity. And 
yet, as he explained to us, many of the Assisians 



THE ASSISI OF ST. FRANCIS 151 

are in such desperate straits that something 
immediate has to be done to keep them from 
actual starvation. In order to assure the half- 
starved school children of at least one nourish- 
ing meal a day, he established, several years 
ago, a soup kitchen that has developed into a 
social center from which radiate many health- 
ful influences that make toward the material 
and spiritual betterment of the entire commu- 
nity. 

One morning while in Assisi we climbed with 
M. Sabatier to the old crumbling convent of 
San Benedetto, whither St. Francis, immedi- 
ately after his conversion, is reported to have 
gone in order to engage in the most menial 
work. During our promenade the air was 
thick with blessings called down on M. Saba- 
tier's head. Different saints were loudly im- 
plored to escort him on his walk, the " safe 
conduct " being entrusted to St. Francis in the 
lower quarter of the city, to St. Rufino in the 
upper, and to St. Claire outside the gates, while 
along the entire route the Madonna was im- 
portuned in his behalf by these simple souls 
who look on him as nothing less than a modern 
saint. Indeed, if he were only a Roman Cath- 
olic, one might easily imagine him being can- 
onized after his death as St. Sabatier of Assisi. 2 

2 1 remember his half-serious, half -laughing reply to a 



152 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

While lunching near the convent he regaled 
us with some of the quaint legends of St. Fran- 
cis and St. Claire which the natives of this par- 
ticular locality have handed down from one 
generation to another as a sort of folk-lore. 
One of these legends tells how on a winter day 
when the two saints were going about the coun- 
try together on their errands of mercy, word 
was brought that certain mischievous tongues 
were wagging on their account, whereupon St. 
Francis decided to send from him the gentle 
soul whose wise counsels and unfailing loyalty 
to his ideals had been like heaven's own balm 
to his tired spirit. A few moments after St. 
Claire had gone, tearfully obedient to his com- 
mand, she came running back to ask when she 
might look into his face again. " Not until 
the roses bloom, my child," St. Francis replied 
sadly, thinking of the long months to come; but 
suddenly while he spoke, out of the snow which 
covered the ground where they stood there 
sprang up a mass of wonderful roses. So this 
miracle, which was plainly a sign from heaven, 
put an end to evil gossip, and the two saints 
took up again that gracious and gentle compan- 

query as to whether he were a Catholic or a Protestant. 
" Neither the one nor the other," he said. " I am a Fran- 
ciscan." If one realizes all that the ideals of St. Francis 
mean to him, this is probably as complete a definition of his 
religious tendencies as could be given. 



THE ASSISI OF ST. FRANCIS 153 

ionship which is one of the most perfect idylls 
that life has given to literature. 

Late in the afternoon, after exploring the 
ruins of the convent, we started home. Our 
road wound down among the hills where olive 
trees cast their lingering shadows, and through 
the mass of silvery foliage we saw the sun set- 
ting in purple splendor. But we were think- 
ing less of the present than of the past, for our 
imaginations had gone on a far journey to a 
summer day seven centuries ago when St. Fran- 
cis was carried down this same road that he 
might bless Assisi and die among her people. 
High above us in a cleft of the mountains was 
the cave of the Carceri where his soul so often 
had " gone up for gain to God "; below, in the 
valley, rose the great dome of the church of 
Santa Maria degli Angeli, built over the chapel 
of the Portiuncula, which was to him a very 
holy of holies, since there he had so often 
heard the voice of the Crucified One calling 
him to serve, and at last heard that same voice 
calling him to rest. 

At every turn we were reminded of some 
fresh scene in the life of St. Francis or St. 
Claire. On one side were the foundations of 
the lordly house of St. Claire's father. From 
another point we could see the convent where, 
as a young girl she had first been led by St. 



154 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

Francis, after taking her vows, and where 
white-robed novitiates still pledge themselves 
as " brides of the Christ." Coming down into 
the town, as we passed the bishop's house 
where St. Francis had been carried in his last 
illness, we remembered how, when dying, he 
had lifted up his voice so gladly to welcome 
" Sister Death " that one of his over-sensitive 
companions, Brother Elias, rebuked him for 
unseemly conduct. The fear of the Assisians 
that he might die outside their city and that 
some other town, notably Perugia, might steal 
his body, led them to send armed soldiers to 
accompany him and guard the place where he 
lay, for in those days the possession of a saint's 
body was a veritable gold mine to a city, and 
the very finger nails of St. Francis were relics 
of incalculable value. It was in front of the 
bishop's house that the youthful saint had 
marked the beginning of his new career by 
tearing the clothes off his back and hurling them 
at his father in token that he thus renounced 
his inheritance. 3 A little farther on, in an an- 
cient house, we passed the very door through 
which St. Claire had escaped the night she went 
to the Portiuncula to take her vows. 

3 One of Giotto's most famous frescoes in the Church of 
Santa Croce in Florence depicts this scene, while one of Rus- 
kin's most illuminating interpretations was inspired by it. 



THE ASSISI OF ST. FRANCIS 155 

In the cathedral we saw the baptismal fount 
where St. Francis and St. Claire as infants had 
been " given to the Lord " by parents who 
strove hard to take back the gifts when these 
children, grown to manhood and womanhood, 
chose to ratify these vows and literally rededi- 
cate themselves. 

Halfway down the road we were joined by 
a fourteen-year-old lad who strove to make him- 
self agreeable in the hope of an ultimate tip. 
We stopped for a second to look in at a little 
wayside chapel whose walls were covered with 
frescoes which, though poor, had yet a certain 
lingering grace. By way of stimulating our 
interest, our companion launched out on the fol- 
lowing tale, which made up in originality what 
it lacked in historical accuracy and continuity: 

" A certain woman, named Attilia, lived 
here and then she went to America (N. B. 
1 America ' stands for the great unknown be- 
yond the seas. If anyone goes off and is never 
heard from, he is surely lost in America). 
After her departure for America, St. Fileppo, 
a contemporary of St. Peter, came and lived in 
her hut, and shortly after Saint Fileppo died, 
Giotto happened to be passing by, and deco- 
rated the walls with these scenes from his life." 
Such a delicious jumble was better than any 
fairy tale. We questioned the boy, first, as to 



156 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

(his knowledge of history — i about when did 
Giotto live ? As many as fifty years ago ? He 
saw we were making sport of him, so he an- 
swered stoutly, though rather vaguely, " Oh, 
yes, signora, many more years than that — 
perhaps four or five thousand." As to his geo- 
graphical knowledge, that was not more defi- 
nite. Where this lady had gone to live in 
America, whether to New York or Buenos 
Ayres, he could not say; America was " molto 
lontana" (very far), was it not? How could 
one say exactly? 

The hermitage of St. Damien which we 
turned aside to see was to me the most moving 
of all the memorials of Assisi. The little bare 
chapel hid away among the olive trees on the 
hillside, and the garden, kept just as it was in 
the time of St. Francis and St. Claire, seemed 
still calm with the peace which these two left 
upon them. It was in the rude chapel of St. 
Damien that the crucifix spoke to St. Francis, 
and the reparation of its altar was his first la- 
bor of love. In this place later he established 
St. Claire and those other devoted women who 
were associated with her, and here under the 
shade of its olive trees, with Claire ministering 
to his broken body and inspiring anew his spirit, 
he composed the " Canticle of the Sun " which 
Ernest Renan pronounced " the most perfect 



THE ASSISI OF ST. FRANCIS 157 

utterance of modern religious sentiment." 4 
As we reached the hotel, the four bells, 
called the " Quartette of St. Francis," were 
ringing out the seven o'clock vespers, and sud- 
denly down in the valley myriads of little lights 
flashed out of cottage windows till the whole 
plain was a mass of twinkling fires. Someone 
quoted: 

" Silently one by one, in the infinite meadowsf of 

heaven, 
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the 

angels." 

Only in this case it was the meadows of earth 
that were blossoming, and the forget-me-nots 
were St. Joseph's, for as it was the eve of St. 
Joseph's fete, at the vesper hour every house 
in the valley lit a candle or a bonfire in his 
honor. It is the custom among the peasants 
for every member of the family on this ocasion 
to jump across the bonfire, calling loudly on St. 
Joseph to chase the devils from the house. 
Betrothed lovers frequently announce their en- 
gagement by leaping over the fire together, 
and we met one old peasant who boasted that 
at the age of eighty she still " jumped St. Jo- 
seph's fire." In the public square Assisi had 
built a great bonfire in honor of St. Joseph, and 

* See Appendix " B." 



158 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

in the flames that leaped and writhed we could 
easily imagine the evil spirits of the city going 
out in fire. 

One feature of St. Joseph's fete which 
smacks somewhat of carnal-mindedness is the 
eating in his memory of a certain fried rice- 
cake. The Madonna being a great gadabout, 
so the legend runs, and often not getting home 
in time to prepare the mid-day meal, St. Jo- 
seph, left to his own resources, invented this 
cake, which had the double merit of being 
quickly cooked and easily digested. That night 
at dinner we all ate religiously of these cakes, 
and as St. Joseph happened to be the patron 
saint of our host, Signor Rossi, the hotel fur- 
nished Vin d'Aste in which to drink to the 
health of the two. 

The superstition of these peasants is naive 
in the extreme. In some matters their credu- 
lity is incredible. One day while walking along 
a country road we noticed a peacock whose 
gorgeousness of tail was almost eclipsed by the 
brilliant worsted yarns that streamed from his 
head. Upon inquiry we learned that the peas- 
ants are so fearful praise of a peacock's tail 
will result in the premature loss of its plumage 
that they exert all their ingenuity to rivet atten- 
tion on some other feature. 

We had another illustration of this attempt 



THE ASSISI OF ST. FRANCIS 159 

to outwit the evil fates when a peasant brought 
her goat to the hotel to supply an invalid with 
fresh milk. The animal was a fine specimen, 
with such large and prepossessing udders that 
the invalid remarked on them with satisfaction 
and delight. The owner seemed far from ap- 
preciating the compliment, and the next day the 
goat arrived with her head bound in strips of 
calico, while gaily colored ribbons floated from 
her horns. In reply to our exclamations we 
learned that the poor woman had torn her pet- 
ticoat to pieces and spent her last cent on rib- 
bons with which to deck the goat's horns in 
order to " head off " further unlucky reference 
to its udders ! 

We were fortunate to be in Assisi at the end 
of Lent, to witness the really mediaeval cere- 
monies with which Assisi, almost alone among 
the Italian cities, still celebrates the closing 
scenes of the Passion. In the cathedral on 
Maundy Thursday the commemoration of the 
washing of the disciples' feet gave an oppor- 
tunity for the picture-loving people to inject 
something spectacular into their service. 
When the bishop arrived and took his seat on 
his throne, various ecclesiastics handed him 
linen cloths with which he girded himself. 
He then stepped down and proceeded to wash 
the feet of twelve old men ranged in two rows 



160 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

opposite him, who, dressed in the garb of peni- 
tents and scrubbed in advance for the occasion, 
represented the twelve apostles. After em- 
bracing them and washing their feet (one apos- 
tle was sent away in disgrace, having left all 
the work to the bishop), Monseigneur gave to 
each a bunch of flowers, a few sous, a loaf of 
white bread, — which was a luxury, — and a 
towel, — which was a necessity, since his own 
drying had been somewhat perfunctory, and the 
fact that most of the apostles were sockless 
made it hard work at best for them to pull on 
their stiff boots. We left the apostles tugging 
away at their foot gear, smelling their bou- 
quets, munching their loaves of bread, and jin- 
gling their pennies — on the whole looking 
most pleased, in contrast to the rather bored 
expression of the bishop. 

Later in the afternoon of the same day, in 
the lower church of St. Francis, where gor- 
geously robed ecclesiastics celebrated with 
stately Gregorian chants and clouds of incense 
the agony of Gethsemane and the taking of 
Christ in the garden, a unique feature was in- 
troduced into the service. Suddenly, in the 
midst of the chanting, a side door burst open 
and about twenty little ragged boys, armed 
with heavy sticks, came trooping into the 
church, dashed their clubs wildly to the floor, 



THE ASSISI OF ST. FRANCIS 161 

and ran out again, shouting madly. There 
was great consternation among the foreigners 
in the audience until they were informed that 
this pandemonium was a part of the perform- 
ance and that the small boys, who certainly 
were well chosen for their role, represented the 
confusion of the Roman soldiers, the flight of 
the disciples, and the general horror of that 
garden scene. 

In the cathedral on Friday afternoon, at the 
conclusion of the service in memory of the 
hours Christ hung on the cross, some of the 
clergy mounted ladders and took down from 
over the high altar the life-sized flesh-colored 
image of the Christ. After washing and wip- 
ing the body carefully, they wrapped it in linen 
cloths and placed it on a bier. People swarm- 
ing into the cathedral pressed forward to kiss 
the body, and for five minutes we were so 
caught in the crowd that we could not get out. 
It was a weird scene, with enough realism in it 
to make it uncanny, but just enough reverence 
on the part of the people to keep it from being 
wholly revolting. Italian crowds do not al- 
ways inspire lofty emotions, and my one desire 
was to escape from the ghastly sights, mournful 
sounds and stifling odors — which last were 
so pungent and overpowering that, as an Amer- 
ican girl near me remarked, the smell of garlic 



1 62 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

on the man next her was a positive refreshment. 
Very early Saturday morning a great pro- 
cession formed to carry the body of Christ 
down to the Church of St. Francis, where it 
was to lie in state until evening. About mid- 
way between the cathedral and St. Francis the 
procession stopped at a convent where the nuns, 
who never leave the place or have any commu- 
nication with the outside world, were permit- 
ted for a few moments to gaze at the figure of 
the Christ which was lowered into their chapel. 
The nuns wailed and wept over the body of 
their mystical bridegroom, covering it with 
flowers and kisses, while mingled with their 
prayers and sobs came the whispered comments 
of the people outside as they caught a glimpse 
of some white face they recognized. " How 
she is changed, my child — I would not know 
her," I heard one old woman sob, as she 
pointed out a daughter who had been dead to 
her for many years. But this heart-rending 
scene was soon over, the last looks were ex- 
changed, the body was drawn up, the grating 
was closed and the procession moved on to the 
lower church, while the nuns were left for an- 
other year with only the memory of the dead 
Christ, and perhaps some new heart hunger 
for others who, in spite of all their vigils and 
struggles, were not yet dead to them. 



THE ASSISI OF ST. FRANCIS 163 

It was pathetic to see those poor peasants 
creeping into the dimly-lit lower church, — old 
men hobbling in on their canes and kneeling 
painfully to kiss the body, some of them for 
the last time; old women in rags, bent and wrin- 
kled, who could hardly drag themselves along; 
young mothers with babes at their breasts; and 
peasants from the fields — such a poor, sad 
crowd it was, with only here and there a well- 
fed, well-dressed person to give a glint of 
happy color. In the midst of the afternoon 
service a tiny child, not over four years old, 
toddled into the church alone. She wore 
coarse hob-nailed shoes that grated on the stone 
floor as she scraped up the aisle to where the 
Christ lay. Dropping on her knees at the 
steps, she tugged at the crepe on the figure, and 
as she struggled to kiss the body and could 
not with all her tip-toeing, the King of Sax- 
ony, who had come to Assisi on a pilgrimage 
and was following the ceremonies from a pri- 
vate enclosure near the altar, stepped out and 
lifted her up. For a second the wee waif was 
in the king's arms, utterly unconscious of every- 
thing but the ceremony in which she was taking 
her solemn part. As the king set her down, 
she crossed herself piously, dropped one more 
reverence by the bier, and then toddled out. 
With her great black eyes, her ragged dress 



1 64 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

and her head tied up in an old handkerchief, 
she was the most solemn and demure bit of hu- 
manity I have ever seen. What stray little 
waif she was I could not learn, but this one 
touch of vital Christianity in the midst of so 
much petrified pomp was refreshing, and, more 
than all the masses the King of Saxony had sat 
through, I thought, would be counted this kind- 
ness of his to one of the least of the little ones. 

At night the whole city was illuminated and 
a great procession of all the fraternities, com- 
prising the entire male population of Assisi, 
filed down from the cathedral in double lines 
to the Church of St. Francis, each carrying a 
lighted taper. The men were dressed in the 
costumes of their organizations, while each fra- 
ternity had one masked figure representing the 
Christ bearing His cross. Finally came eight 
masked men, carrying a great figure of the Ma- 
donna with a crown on her head and a hand- 
kerchief in her hand and seven swords piercing 
her side. Slowly the procession filed down the 
hill and into the great dark lower church, chant- 
ing that weird sweet sixteenth century hymn — 
the " Stabat Mater." 

A little later the worshipers filed out, carry- 
ing the body of the Christ as well as that of the 
Madonna. The band stationed at the door 
struck up the " Dead March from Saul "; the 



THE ASSISI OF ST. FRANCIS 165 

crowd dropped on its knees as the figures were 
borne past; and silently the procession wound 
its way back to the cathedral, where the Virgin 
and her Son were left in peace for another year. 
Slowly the great piazza emptied itself. 
The torches and candles died away in the dis- 
tance, and we stood alone on the broad parapet 
that overlooks the valley. Looking up, out of 
the darkness which settled down on us all the 
deeper after the dim lights were gone, we saw 
the stars serenely shining, and our hearts were 
filled with a great wonder and a great peace. 
The man-made pageant was over, but the 
matchless pageantry of nature was spread out 
above us in an endless procession of stars and 
suns and systems of worlds, and I thanked God 
that in those hours of spiritual gloom when 
church and priest seem powerless to aid, when 
the flare of earth's torches has vanished, and 
the artificial lights we have been walking by 
fail, we still may look up to where the stars are 
shining, and read, if we will, their message of 
hope: 

" God's in His Heaven, 
All's right with the world." 



APPENDIX " B " 
THE CANTICLE OF THE SUN 

O most high, almighty, good Lord God, to Thee 
belong praise, glory, honor, and all blessing! 

Praised be my Lord God, with all His creatures, 
and specially our brother, the Sun, who brings us the 
day, and who brings us the light; fair is he, and shines 
with a great splendor: O Lord, he signifies to us 
Thee! 

Praised be my Lord for our sister, the Moon, and 
for the Stars, the which He has set clear and lovely 
in heaven. 

Praised be my Lord for our brother, the Wind, and 
for air and cloud, calms and all weather, by the which 
Thou upholdest life in all creatures. 

Praised be my Lord for our sister Water, who is very 
serviceable unto us, and humble, and precious, and 
clean. 

Praised be my Lord for our brother Fire, through 
whom Thou givest us light in the darkness, and he is 
bright and pleasant and very mighty and strong. 

Praised be my Lord for our mother, the Earth, the 
which doth sustain us and keep us, and bringeth forth 
divers fruits, and flowers of many colors, and grass. 

Praised be my Lord for all those who pardon one 
another for His love's sake, and who endure weakness 

166 



APPENDIX " B" 167 

and tribulation; blessed are they who peaceably shall 
endure, for Thou, O most Highest, shalt give them a 
crown. 

Praised be the Lord for our sister, the Death of 
the body, from which no man escapeth. Woe to him 
who dieth in mortal sin! 

Blessed are they who are found walking by Thy 
most holy will, for the second death shall have no 
power to do them harm. 

Praise ye, and bless the Lord, and give thanks unto 
Him and serve Him, with great humility. 

M. Sabatier adds : " ' The Canticle of the Creatures ' is 
very noble. It lacks, however, one strophe; if it was not 
upon Francis' lips, it was surely in his heart: 
Be praised, Lord, for sister Claire; 
Thou hast made her silent, active and sagacious, 
And by her thy light shines in our hearts." 



CHAPTER XI 
TOURING TUSCANY A LA BOHEME 

While many of the larger cities in Italy fur- 
nish confirmation of the saying, " God made 
the country, man made the town," one has a 
feeling that in the construction of some of her 
unrivaled hill towns, God and man must have 
conspired together. In these small places more 
or less off the tourist line of march, one is apt 
to meet chiefly those members of the post- 
graduate course of travel who already have 
seen the stock sights and have begun to special- 
ize by searching out for themselves the rare 
secrets and half-hidden charms of the less fre- 
quented haunts of history and beauty. 

All over Italy, in quiet little places like Si- 
ena, Perugia, Assisi, Orvieto, and Ravenna, are 
to be found delightful men and women — 
critics, historians, and artists — who study and 
write and paint, living the simplest life phys- 
ically, the strenuous life intellectually and the 
all-round artistic and bohemian life generally 

— holding to the belief that there are many 

168 



TOURING TUSCANY 169 

things in this world besides a good name which 
are to be chosen above riches. They do their 
work as God does his — slowly, joyfully, and 
as perfectly as they know how — while from 
their picturesque quarters in some historic villa 
or mediaeval tower they look out tranquilly — 
often a bit wonderingly, and sometimes even 
pityingly — upon the great mass of hurried, 
worried, misguided men who live and strive 
and suffer all their lives long in the dwarfing 
ruts of routine, seeking only to gain a tinsel 
conventional success which seldom brings either 
real happiness, lasting fame, or unpolluted 
honor. 

While the rather renaissance conception of 
life which artist folk are apt to adopt not only 
falls short of the Christian ideal, but even fails 
to measure up to the Stoic standard of Epicte- 
tus, or Marcus Aurelius, who demonstrated 
that " even in a palace life may be lived well," 
it unquestionably is a higher conception of life 
than that at which modern Philistinism has ar- 
rived. 

Many people, if we are to believe their state- 
ments, have gone to Italy and fallen among 
thieves, but few there or elsewhere could have 
fallen into a more charmed circle of artists and 
critics than we found in Siena. If we are not 
art connoisseurs ourselves by this time, it is not 



i 7 o LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

because we were not exposed to the contagion 
in its most virulent form. Our new-found 
friends, whom we met around the omnipresent 
tea table of an English essayist, were all en- 
thusiasm over a projected trip to a number of 
Tuscan hill towns, including San Gimignano 
and Volterra. 

When we parted late in the afternoon, it was 
with the invitation to gather the following day 
at the apartment of one of the critics to per- 
fect plans for this trip, in which we found our- 
selves included as naturally as though we had 
known these people years instead of hours — 
such short work is made of the Gordian knot 
of convention in the realm of Bohemia, where 
kindred tastes and congenial interests constitute 
a perennial passport. 

The promoter in chief of the expedition, one 
of the critics, was a cosmopolitan by birth and 
training. Born in Japan of an English father 
and an American mother, he received his edu- 
cation in Germany and finally settled in Italy, 
where he became a recognized authority on me- 
diaeval art. Although in his painstaking and 
deliberate methods of work he seemed like a 
medievalist pure and simple, in his alert think- 
ing on modern questions he was singularly up- 
to-date, and had a quiet way of turning the 
light from Japan, or Italy, or Germany, on to 



TOURING TUSCANY 171 

problems under discussion, that often proved il- 
luminating and suggestive. 

While most of the party had their headquar- 
ters at Siena, Florence and Rome, each sent a 
representative American colonist, while two 
artists came on from Paris — a genial and tal- 
ented Englishman, whose prospects as the heir 
to a title unfortunately had been allowed to in- 
terfere with his prospects in art, and a young 
American marine painter already hailed as a 
coming man — a big, magnetic fellow, full of 
poetry and fire, with an endless capacity for ab- 
sorbing impressions of beauty and a lavish in- 
stinct for passing them on to others, enriched 
and enlarged by his own creative imagination. 

Most of the women were content with the 
distinction of being the wives of their respective 
husbands, but there was one unmarried woman, 
a clever art connoisseur with a well-defined ca- 
reer of her own. She had been at the head of 
the Fine Arts Department at one of our great 
expositions and later was entrusted with the 
selection and purchase of the extensive collec- 
tion of an American millionaire who poses as a 
patron of art. 

The morning we were to start a drizzling 
rain set in which lasted several days. An 
archaeologist who had come from Rome espe- 
cially for the trip to Volterra had promised to 



172 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

unravel for us the tangled threads of the as yet 
unwritten history of its strange civilization; 
but the continued downpour perceptibly damp- 
ened his ardor, and when on the fourth con- 
secutive day the rains descended with unabated 
zest and the floods came and beat upon that 
archaeologist, he fell — or rather fled for shel- 
ter to the catacombs of Rome. Although with 
him fled all our hopes of enlightenment as to 
the mysterious inner meaning of the sauce-pans, 
jack-knives, brooches, scarabs, mirrors and 
weapons with which the ancient Etruscans so 
lavishly provided their dead, personally I was 
entirely reconciled to his departure, as I had a 
feeling that his more or less sepulchral disserta- 
tions, added to the aesthetic outpourings of our 
artists and the higher criticism of our critics, 
might make the mental pressure excessive. 

While waiting for the weather to clear, we 
had an opportunity at the Belle Arti and vari- 
ous churches, not only to study art in the ab- 
stract, but, what was even more interesting, to 
observe artists and art critics in the concrete. 
Heretofore we always had thought of these 
two types of art devotees as belonging to the 
same generic family and " dwelling together 
as brethren " in an almost scriptural unity of 
sympathy and understanding, and I remember 
the distinct shock we had on discovering the 



TOURING TUSCANY 173 

great gulf which separates them temperamen- 
tally, causing them to have such different — 
not to say antagonistic — points of view. 

Being the only lay members of the party, 
and consequently the only ones who were suffi- 
ciently ignorant of art to serve on a jury, the 
very rarity of our ignorance gave to us a ficti- 
tious and flattering importance, since the war- 
ring critics and artists, each in turn, would ap- 
peal to our sober, unprejudiced and unin- 
formed judgment for a confirmation of their 
particular views. This confirmation we 
promptly and privately gave to each applicant. 
Holding, as we did, the balance of power, we 
might have been tyrannical, but instead we gra- 
ciously sided with one school of thought after 
another, showing the utmost impartiality and a 
royal disregard for consistency. 

One day a group of critics cornered us in the 
library of the cathedral at Siena, where the 
artists were going into raptures over the glit- 
tering frescoes by Pinturicchio, and seized this 
opportunity to hold up to scorn the manifest 
shortcomings of the artistic temperament. 
" That the artist was a useful and an interest- 
ing creature," they were free to admit; "but 
who," they demanded, " that knew the species 
intimately, could honestly say that he was a 
well-balanced or a reasonable one?' 



i 7 4 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

" As a general thing," they continued, warm- 
ing up to the subject, " he lives in an abnormal 
world of impulse and sensation, and is always 
thinking and talking about his aesthetic emo- 
tions. These purely sensuous reactions to aes- 
thetic impressions or stimuli unquestionably 
have their importance and value, but as every 
psychologist knows, they need constantly to be 
guided, interpreted and restrained by the crit- 
ical intelligence. Immersed as each artist must 
necessarily be in his own particular branch of 
artistic expression, he is all too apt to become 
as disdainful as he is ignorant of the study of 
art as a whole. What does the average land- 
scape or portrait painter know or care about 
the history of art, the philosophy of art, or the 
inspiring modern study of comparative art in 
all ages and among all races? As a rule," 
they concluded gravely, " artists, like children 
or savages, lack intellectual grasp and balance." 

The following day in the Belle Arti, while 
the critics with much wrangling and efferves- 
cing were laboriously searching out traces of a 
certain master's hand in the folds of the drap- 
ery and the drawing of the feet of a battered 
thirteenth century creation, the artists, growing 
restive and cynical, made us the target for a 
spirited diatribe on the constitutional limita- 
tions of the critics. 



TOURING TUSCANY 175 

" Of course, we realize that you are not art- 
ists," they explained, " but merely as intelligent 
observers and people of judgment, surely you 
must recognize how utterly these critics fail to 
see art in its true perspective. By measuring 
the ears, eyelashes and finger-nails of figures, 
and by other equally mechanical methods, pos- 
sibly they may be able to determine who has 
painted this or that particular picture — but 
what of that? What do they know about the 
moving power, the tremendous symbolism of 
art? What really aesthetic appreciation of a 
picture do they have? What emotional stimu- 
lus do they get from sheer glory of color and 
beauty of line, or what can they possibly know 
of the ecstasy of artistic creation? It is true 
they go through a daily bath of beauty, but they 
come out unrefreshed and unillumined. We 
grant you they are historians, connoisseurs, sci- 
entists — they know all about art — like 
Moses they can see and point the way to the 
Promised Land, but into the real realm of art, 
— of pure, aesthetic sensuous beauty, — they 
themselves can never come. They are not of 
our world." 

" To think," they concluded in disgust, " of 
any normal human beings preferring the dingy 
caricatures of Duccio or the pallidities of Fra 
Angelico to the gorgeous creations of Benozzo 






176 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

Gozzoli or Ghirlandaio, instinct with the joy 
of living, radiant with color, and pulsing with 
passion and power! " 

While in artistic discussion all reference to 
Ruskin was tacitly avoided on account of the 
violent prejudices for and against him that 
were apt to divide us into warring camps at 
mention of his name, we all were Ruskinites in 
that we objected on principle to taking the 
railway if we could find any animate or inani- 
mate substitute to get us over the ground. 
Accordingly, when the weather finally cleared, 
we started off from Siena one memorable 
spring morning in a gay cavalcade; some of the 
men on bicycles, several on tough little moun- 
tain ponies that galloped up-hill as energetically 
as down, and the rest of us in ancient and rick- 
ety Italian vehicles which dated back to the pre- 
Raphaelite period, if not to prehistoric times. 

Tourists often make the mistake of taking 
conditions which prevail in the vicinity of Na- 
ples as the standard of Italian thrift and hon- 
esty, and thus are apt to include all Italy and 
Italians in one sweeping condemnation, after 
the manner of the Irish maid who protested 
she could not see why her mistress wanted to 
study Italian since " few spake it and them's 
mostly dirty." In our ignorance of Tuscany 
we had prepared ourselves for the worst in the 



TOURING TUSCANY 177 

matter of accommodations, expecting to have 
to put up with unspeakable discomforts in out- 
of-the-way places on our route, not yet realiz- 
ing that, no matter into what remote corner of 
Tuscany one may penetrate, he can always be 
sure of courteous treatment, a good clean bed, 
and wholesome, well-cooked food. 

In the course of several weeks we took our 
leisurely way over the hills and across the val- 
leys, stopping at a number of Tuscan towns 
which, after their tempestuous youth, have set- 
tled down to such a green old age that in their 
ruined watch-towers trees have sprung up for 
sentinels, while wild flowers run riot over walls 
that rival armies used to scale. Although most 
of these places were fairly inlaid and overlaid 
with treasures of art, the bubble of our pleas- 
ure was constantly being pricked by the tantaliz- 
ing thought that no matter what particular spot 
we happened to be in, just a little further down 
the valley or across the hills there was a seem- 
ingly endless chain of equally interesting places 
which beckoned us, making us realize that 
though our time was limited, Italy's treasures 
were not. Indeed, it has often seemed to me a 
cruel fate not to be able to live forever and to 
spend one's lifetime in Italy! 

Of the towns we visited, two stand out now 
in memory as they do in reality, — higher, older 



178 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

and rarer than any of the others, — San Gimig- 
nano, with her musical name and memories that 
reach back to Dante ; and Volterra, whose som- 
ber bricks and stones, softened by Time's sub- 
tle touch, glow with colors that only the cen- 
turies give, — cities set on a hill, yet hid from 
the world, shrouded in mystery and oblivion. 

Our entrance into San Gimignano late one 
afternoon, just as the sun was setting and the 
cathedral chimes were tolling out the death of 
another day, seemed in keeping with the spirit 
of this place, whose day in the working world 
is done and yet about whose winding streets 
and crumbling palaces there still linger a beauty 
and a pathos like the afterglow of her departed 
greatness. The whole place seems more like 
a mediaeval mirage than a present-day reality. 
Nowhere else in Italy does one get so strongly 
the feeling of being transplanted bodily into the 
life of the Middle Ages. Dante himself, when 
he came on his famous mission from Florence, 
might have stopped in the same dark old Pa- 
lazzo that sheltered us, and the city we saw was 
in very truth the city of his day, girt with its 
massive walls and still boasting fifteen of those 
fifty towers which in its warlike youth had been 
its crown of glory and won for it the name 
" San Gimignano delle belle torri" 



TOURING TUSCANY 179 

Like all small Italian towns, San Gimignano 
is richer in sacred edifices than in anything else, 
unless it be legends and relics. The Collegiata 
— one of its twelve places of worship — con- 
tains some characteristic examples of Benozzo 
Gozzoli, and frescoes by Ghirlandaio in which 
that highly academic artist for once forgets his 
technique and loses himself in the tender de- 
lineation of scenes from the life of the child 
saint of San Gimignano, Santa Fina, whose pa- 
tience and serenity in suffering shed a strange 
halo of sanctity over the bloody annals of a 
crafty and warlike age. Legend has it that at 
her death all the bells in San Gimignano of 
their own accord rang out together to celebrate 
her release, and unearthly flowers blossomed 
about the poor little room where for five years 
she had lain on her narrow board. 

The Collegiata has yet another claim on our 
interest, since two hundred years after the 
death of Santa Fina, during the Lenten season 
of 1484, its walls rang with the fiery eloquence 
of the young Savonarola as he denounced with 
prophetic power and passion the luxuries and 
vices of his beautiful and proudly pagan age. 
The Dominican monastery in which he was en- 
tertained has since been converted into a peni- 
tentiary, while the luxury of the San Gimig- 



180 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

nanese, which he declared to be a stench in the 
nostrils of Almighty God, has given way to an 
almost monastic poverty. 

The walls of our bedrooms at San Gimig- 
nano offered the only modern touch about the 
place, as they were elaborately frescoed, in tri- 
umphant imitation of American wall-paper, 
which the enterprising little proprietor evi- 
dently coveted but could not afford. While 
here our party in general, and the critics in par- 
ticular, were reinforced by Mr. X., who had 
spent the last few years studying comparative 
art in the different European galleries from 
Madrid to St. Petersburg. He was a type by 
himself — a broad-shouldered six-footer who 
lived the strenuous life in the superlative de- 
gree every minute of the day. He traveled 
everywhere, even over mountain passes, on his 
wheel, which he apparently rode or carried 
with equal ease and to which was usually 
strapped a small library consisting of a dozen 
or more books, varying in size from the huge 
volumes of Crowe and Cavalcaselle's " History 
of Painting in Italy " to a little pocket edition 
of Omar. At the tops of hills, while the other 
cyclists were panting for breath, he often would 
take off his coat and turn a series of somer- 
saults to exercise what he considered a neg- 
lected set of muscles. He had a habit of dis- 



TOURING TUSCANY 181 

appearing from the crowd after dinner and re- 
tiring to his own room, where on one occasion 
a committee sent in search of him found him 
seated under a mass of bed-clothing, puffing 
furiously away at his pipe and making volumin- 
ous notes by candlelight, while five or six scal- 
dinos which he had appropriated from our 
other rooms did their feeble best to mitigate 
the icy temperature of his enormous apartment. 

In Volterra, the next place on our program, 
where in those days tourists were still a novelty, 
the arrival of a party of " forestieri " was 
hailed as a public event, and the entire popula- 
tion seemed to be lined up on the parapet to 
witness the approach of our strange cavalcade. 
Here we spent four busy days haunting tombs 
and ruins and mentally transplanting ourselves 
into the curious and ancient Etruscan civiliza- 
tion where, in the absence of the archaeologist, 
our uninstructed imaginations were allowed to 
roam absolutely at will. 

In the cathedral and baptistry we saw some 
superb early examples of the sculptor's art, 
and in other churches and palaces we found a 
wealth of pictures and frescoes that called viv- 
idly to mind those halcyon days when Volterra 
pressed into her service such men as Benozzo 
Gozzoli, Signorelli, Ghirlandaio, and her own 
artist son, Daniele da Volterra, whose vig- 



1 82 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

orous talent, as some one has said, " lost its 
liberty to the conquering genius of Michael 
Angelo." 

A very agreeable surprise was in store for 
us here, which, though it had nothing to do 
with archaeological or artistic explorations, 
seemed to add the finishing touch to every- 
body's good humor and satisfaction. On leav- 
ing Siena we had been greatly disappointed to 
learn that Mr. Q., one of the prime movers 
in organizing the trip, had been suddenly called 
home to America on urgent business and was 
sailing by the first boat from Naples. When, 
therefore, the day after our arrival at Volterra, 
the diligence drove up in a pouring rain, there 
was general rejoicing, as well as amazement, at 
the sight of our " lost leader " sitting on the 
front seat, with his hat set well back on his head 
and his cavalier cape flying, equally unmindful 
of the downpour and of his urgent business in 
America, discussing Italian unity with the coach- 
man, who happened to be an old Garibaldi sol- 
dier. 

His face and head were strikingly like Ti- 
tian's in the artist's portrait of himself, and 
the skull cap he invariably wore indoors, as 
well as a way he had of trimming his reddish- 
brown beard, further bore out the resemblance 
and made us nickname him " the only original 



TOURING TUSCANY 183 

living Titian." He was deeply learned, a pro- 
found student of life as well as of art, yet sim- 
ple as a child. Exceedingly modest and almost 
always silent in a crowd, he nevertheless had 
a faculty of carrying on the most sparkling 
conversation under his breath if only one or 
two people were listening, or, when sufficiently 
stirred, of contributing to the general discus- 
sion some quiet observation which embodied 
the very essence of wit or of wisdom, as a sip 
of rare wine seems sometimes to contain within 
itself all the distilled fragrance of some famous 
vintage. 

While studying the art of Leonardo, he had 
spent three months in the neighborhood of 
Vinci in order to let the look of Leonardo's 
landscapes sink into his soul, and had roamed 
all over Italy studying Italian life at first hand 
because of his theory that one cannot under- 
stand a nation's art until he understands its peo- 
ple. This wandering scholar with so much of 
the poet in him seemed to have some instinctive 
kinship with the spirit of the old world mas- 
ters, and it did not take us long to discover 
that, interesting and delightful as were the 
other members of the party, he was the chef 
d } oeuvre of our collection. 

As my own study of European countries had 
been chiefly political and economic rather than 



1 84 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

artistic, it is not strange, perhaps, that on this 
trip I should have enjoyed, even more than the 
days spent in museums and galleries, the long 
evenings when, gathered around a blazing fire 
or lingering over our coffee, the conversation 
— as responsive to any random remark as a 
sail to a passing breeze — would flap with easy 
nonchalance from the past to the present, from 
art to life, and from criticism of ancient Italian 
achievements to a discussion of the vital cre- 
ative forces which today are working out the 
industrial, political, and religious renaissance 
of the new Italy. 

I recall with interest one such evening in 
Volterra; the twenty-second of February it hap- 
pened to be, and like loyal patriots we had made 
the walls of the old place ring with toasts to 
the father of that new country which had been 
born about the time the youthful Volterra was 
entering her twentieth century. After differ- 
ent ones had exercised their inalienable rights 
as free-born American citizens to air their par- 
ticular ideas concerning everything American, 
from our most venerable and sacred institutions 
to our latest and most strenuous president, the 
talk turned to Italy, which we discussed in all 
its phases, — past, present and to come. There 
were almost as many points of view as spokes- 
men, for the number of toasts we had drunk 



TOURING TUSCANY 185 

to various celebrities living and dead, if they 
had had little effect on the health of the indi- 
viduals in question, at least had exercised a 
cheering reflex action on our own spirits and 
served to set all tongues wagging. 

Accustomed to consider Italy's greatness as 
confined almost exclusively within the domain 
of art, one of the artists had just been holding 
forth in a rather pessimistic strain on the " lost 
estate of Italy," winding up with the conten- 
tion that the Italian is a worn-out race and that 
its divine afflatus is extinct because its genius 
no longer expresses itself with the old-time 
power on canvas or in marble. 

At this point, Mr. Q's interest in the subject 
getting the better of his natural reticence, he 
leaped headlong into the conversation, taking 
complete possession of the arena. Such a con- 
clusion, he insisted, could be arrived at only 
by ignoring the historical fact that the long 
line of Italy's illustrious sons was by no means 
confined to artists, as well as the psychological 
fact that Italy, peculiarly susceptible to outside 
influences, as are all highly sensitive natures, 
for thousands of years has proved splendidly re- 
sponsive to the inarticulate call of the time, to 
the spirit of the age. Then followed a vivid 
resume of Italy's history from the earliest days, 
when the Roman Empire expressed the idea of 



1 86 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

conquest which was the dominant passion of 
that age, down to the thirteenth and fourteenth 
centuries, when Italy more than any other na- 
tion voiced the spiritual, intellectual, and aes- 
thetic awakening which later was to become 
world-wide. Calling the roll of such men as 
St. Francis in religion, Dante in literature, and 
Michael Angelo in art, whose genius still dom- 
inates and inspires us in spite of all the revolu- 
tions in human thought which separate their 
age from ours, he declared that our modern 
epoch practically dates from the time when two 
Italians, Columbus and Galileo, — the one with 
his compass which guided him past the perils 
of unknown waters to a new continent, and the 
other with his telescope that swept the un- 
charted heavens, — made their separate voy- 
ages of discovery and added to man's slowly in- 
creasing realm of demonstrable knowledge " a 
new heaven and a new earth." 

" Moreover," he continued, u a generation 
ago, when men were transported with the 
vision of human liberty, the Italian people in 
their immortal struggle of the Risorgimento 
gave to the world the sublimest spectacle of 
heroism and self-sacrifice the nineteenth century 
had witnessed, while Mazzini, Italy's prophet 
son, sounded a new note in the universal chorus 
the nations were chanting, adding to the idea of 



TOURING TUSCANY 187 

liberty and ' the rights of man ' for which 
men clamored, an inspiring conception of * the 
duties of man ' or the spiritual responsibilities 
inherent in the exercise of all true liberty. 

' And today," he went on, " when the minds 
of men are stirred as never before with the vi- 
sion of social and political regeneration, there 
are those who predict that Italy will again 
come to the front, and that as the ancient Ro- 
mans were the world's great road builders, so 
the modern Italians will yet play a leading part 
in hewing out for the race a new pathway of 
progress." This prophecy seemed to the rest 
of us a trifle far fetched, as prophecies neces- 
sarily are which run so far afield into an un- 
known future, but Mr. Q., quite unconscious of 
the indulgent smile that greeted the outburst, 
continued his rhapsody. 

" Who knows," he demanded, " but that in 
Italy, the youngest and industrially the most 
backward of the great European nations, where 
the greedy passion of financialism has not yet 
gained a complete ascendancy and where the in- 
nate love of refinement and beauty has not yet 
been sacrificed to our mad modern lust for lux- 
ury, — who knows but that in lowly Italy, rather 
than in one of the more powerful and self-sat- 
isfied nations, there may yet be raised up the 
long-looked-for leader who will show men how 



1 88 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

to usher in the predestined reign of justice on 
earth, foretold by the prophets of every re- 
ligion and sung by the poets of every age? " 1 

Who knows indeed?— "Qui lo sa?"—We 
seemed to catch the echo of familiar words for 
answer, " Qui lo saf " — that is the Italian 
formula for ending every discussion, cutting 
short all argument, shifting every responsibil- 
ity, and dismissing all difficult subjects. 

So we left the question of Italy's future un- 
settled, and next morning again boarded those 
trains of thought — side-tracked over night — 
which led us back into her past, where at least 
he who runs may read her title clear to an im- 
perishable glory. 

Musing over my memories of Volterra, I 
find that more vivid to me than any of her 
archaeological wonders or archaic and renais- 
sance art treasures are a few stray pictures 
that painted themselves on my mind one after- 
noon toward sunset when we took our farewell 
stroll up and down the streets of the old city. 
A Gothic doorway which we came upon at an 
abrupt turn in the road, the ivy-grown arch of 
a ruined cloister at the top of a winding flight 

1 In this connection it is interesting to recall the words of 
Mazzini in the fateful year 1849: "From Rome will one 
day spring the religious transformation destined for the third 
time to bestow moral unity upon Europe." 



TOURING TUSCANY 189 

of steps, and the old Etruscan entrance to the 
city, served each to frame a separate and en- 
chanting bit of landscape; olive-crowned hills 
sloping down to the sea, with here and there 
some ruined castle; in the distance the snowy 
Carraras out of which Michael Angelo hewed 
the marble for his Moses; and far off on the 
horizon, where ocean and sky seemed to lose 
themselves in a mystical union, the island of 
Elba, like a lost ship in a sea of gold. 

As our little company passed gaily through 
the gate, I thought of other processions that 
had passed that way in all these changing cen- 
turies; of Florentine hosts forcing their way 
through to pillage the city in the time of Lo- 
renzo the Magnificent; of Roman armies 
marching on Volterra when she was one of the 
original capitals of Etruria and held her own 
against the world; and, farther back in the dim 
recesses of history, of those solemn processions 
of Etruscans carrying bodies to the tombs out- 
side the city walls, burying their dead with those 
mute symbols of belief in a life beyond the 
grave which today, after forty centuries, still 
witness to that inborn faith in immortality 
which links this vanished race in a common 
bond of hope with the people of every age and 
clime. 

Turning for an instant to look back, I saw 



i 9 o LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

the ancient gateway was framing another pic- 
ture — perhaps the fairest we had seen — for 
the last rays of the setting sun rested on the 
heads of two young lovers, coming slowly down 
the winding street of the old city, dreaming 
their dreams of the future while we talked of 
the buried past. 



CHAPTER XII 
THE ITALY OF OUR DREAMS 

Travelers who from necessity or choice rush 
from Milan to Pisa on to Florence and Rome, 
thence down to Naples and on and out of the 
country, are apt to see only the Italy that is on 
dress parade, decked out in modern finery to 
suit the popular taste and catch the eye and 
ducats of those who are inclined to measure 
her worth by the number of modern con- 
veniences she can boast and her general up-to- 
date appearance. Such people, while undoubt- 
edly contributing largely to her financial sup- 
port, have at the same time threatened to be- 
come her spiritual undoing. 

So many Mrs. Malaprops have found Rome 
" dreadfully out of repair," that Rome, anxious 
to make her guests feel more at home, has set 
about restoring her ruins and repainting her 
pictures. Likewise, Venice, throwing her tra- 
ditions and memories to the winds, has put on 
the Grand Canal an up-to-date steamboat which 
belches forth plentiful smoke as incense to her 

new gods, and blows and whistles and almost 

191 



1 92 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

explodes in its frantic efforts to supply transit 
sufficiently rapid to enable " trippers " to " do 
Venice " in three days and arrive in Rome on 
schedule time. Florence, animated by the same 
thrifty spirit, has turned her Piazza del Duomo 
into an omnibus station, and though from this 
convenient corner one can now catch cars going 
to all parts of the city, it is no longer possible 
with any peace of mind or security of body to 
stand there quietly looking up at Giotto's Cam- 
panile, or studying out the carvings along the 
side of the cathedral. Poor Italy, with all her 
pleasant vineyards, has not yet learned the 
folly of putting new wine into old bottles, or, 
to change the metaphor, of trying to patch a 
Persian rug with bits of modern plush. 

In these show cities on the tourist's line of 
march Italy has come to lead a dual existence. 
In them — to paraphrase Browning — she has 
two faces, one to front the casual tourist with, 
and one to show him who loves her, but it de- 
pends upon the traveler himself, and not upon 
the amount of money or time he lavishes on 
her, which face she turns toward him. One 
man, passing through her cities in the most hur- 
ried fashion, may catch a glimpse of her real 
self; while another, settling down for a long 
stay in her midst, may yet leave without having 
seen more than the mask behind which Italy 



THE ITALY OF OUR DREAMS 193 

seems always to hide from the unappreciative 
throng. But let no one be deceived by this 
caricature which some misguided travelers set 
up in their hearts and worship. The real Italy 
is not mocked. Applying to her Kipling's 
words on England, one might truthfully say : 

If Italy was what Italy seems, 

An' not the Italy of our dreams, 

But only putty, brass and paint, 

'Ow quick we'd chuck 'er, — but she ain't ! 

Thank heaven, Italy "ain't" what Italy 
seems to many people who visit only her large 
cities, and see in them only the most superficial 
and artificial part of what they have to show. 
Thank heaven, there still remains the Italy of 
his dreams for him who comes to her with a sin- 
cere desire to learn some of the secrets of her in- 
ner life in order to live his own life more com- 
pletely; who makes a reverent effort to under- 
stand her lovingly and to love her with a grow- 
ing measure of understanding. To such she 
gives the key that will unlock her hidden treas- 
ures. To him she offers the freedom of those 
cities which for ages have been the centers of 
her fullest life and which, in spite of the vaude- 
ville attractions that have been introduced into 
them for the benefit of the passing crowds, are 
nevertheless the theatre where the splendid 



i 9 4 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

drama of her new Renaissance is being played 
out. In such places as Rome and Milan and 
Florence she offers an endless opportunity for 
the study of Italian life, not only as it has ex- 
pressed itself in ancient history and art, but as 
it is continuing to express itself in industrial 
and political strivings after a higher ideal and 
in the very religious unrest and new social im- 
pulses which are evidence of the reawakening 
of the soul of the nation. 

But on the other hand, to one whose love for 
Italy is rooted in the thought of what she has 
been, and who wishes to shut out for a time the 
consciousness of her present and even the vi- 
sion of her future in order to come more fully 
under her ancient spell, it will be a revelation to 
discover how perfectly the Italy of the past is 
still preserved in many of her little wayside vil- 
lages whose high walls have not yet been 
" taken " by tourists. Here Italy wears no 
mask; she has no artificial appeal to make, 
nothing to offer but her simple self, a trifle 
negligee, perhaps, but full to overflowing of 
native old-world grace and charm. 

If Dante could reverse his famous journey 
and come back from that other world to this, 
while he probably would recognize little besides 
the hills and the baptistry of his beloved Flor- 
ence, he still would find in many of the smaller 



THE ITALY OF OUR DREAMS 195 

towns he knew the same familiar aspects. In 
San Gimignano he would pass through gates 
that had once swung open to welcome him as 
ambassador, and would find the frescoed walls 
of its council chamber unchanged since the days 
when they echoed to the sound of his own voice. 

Among all the memories which have gone to 
make up the picture of a perfect year in Italy, 
none stand out in bolder relief than those of a 
springtime spent in cross-country trips through 
Umbria, with side trips to Padua and Ravenna. 
At Assisi, at Perugia, at Spoleto, at Montefalco, 
or wherever we wandered among these dreamy 
hill cities with their heads in the clouds, we 
invariably found that Giotto or Perugino or 
Piero della Francesca or some other master 
had been there before us, leaving traces of his 
far-off visits in glowing frescoes on church and 
palace walls. 

In the matter of frescoes Umbria, and indeed 
all of Italy, reminds one of the 

". . . . old woman who lived in a shoe, 
Who had so many children she didn't know 
what to do." 

We seldom went for a stroll through the 
streets of even the most dilapidated of these 
little old towns without encountering some rag- 
ged urchin who would dart out at us from an 



196 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

alley demanding if we didn't want to see some- 
body's " Annunciation," or the " Martyrdom " 
of a saint, or " The Last Supper," by some 
local or world celebrity. One day on a lonely 
country road not far from Perugia I was per- 
suaded to climb a rickety ladder and look into 
a hay loft at what proved to be one of the gen- 
tlest Madonnas I had seen, gazing at her Son. 
Another time, while exploring the country near 
Spoleto, we passed a tumbled-down building, 
degenerated from a chapel into a pigsty, on 
whose walls we could still trace the faint 
outlines of a fresco of the Last Judgment. 
Sometimes we found that ancient churches with 
their wealth of faded frescoes had been trans- 
formed into village gymnasiums or town halls, 
where Virgins and saints of bygone ages gazed 
mournfully down at the audience, or listened 
perchance to such socialistic tirades and other 
flights of modern oratory as surely they might 
never hope to understand. 

While other nations are given the traditional 
" page " on which to record their histories, it 
always has seemed to me preposterous that It- 
aly should not have been allowed a whole book ! 
There has been so much to say that in order 
to crowd it all on to the allotted page, often she 
has been forced to write criss-cross and between 
the lines and up and down the margin and back- 



THE ITALY OF OUR DREAMS 197 

wards and forwards across the sheet! Just 
consider, for instance, the mass of manuscript 
packed into the paragraph devoted to the small 
town of Ravenna, where we find the history of 
a century often condensed into a single sen- 
tence. The Ten Commandments engraved on 
a dime would seem like conspicuous and flashy 
headlines compared to the cramped writing It- 
aly's muse has had to resort to here in her ef- 
forts to relate how Ravenna, the headquarters 
of the Adriatic fleet under Augustus and an 
Episcopal See as early as the time of St. Peter, 
was bandied back and forth between rival pow- 
ers for almost two thousand years. 

It had seemed to me impossible to reduce 
my chaotic impressions of Ravennese history 
to any sort of chronological order until I went 
to Ravenna, where this particular paragraph of 
Italy's story is profusely illustrated, and where 
as one reads he may look upon crumbling mon- 
uments of bygone ages and vanished peoples, 
which, like the vast mosaics of San Vitale, have 
been set, piece by piece, into the heart of the 
city by the hands of her Gothic and Byzantine 
builders. 

Glancing down this paragraph, we read that 
as the seat of the Western Empire under Hon- 
orius in the year 402, the city was wrested from 
the Romans by the Ostrogoths under their great 



i 9 8 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

leader, Theodoric, who ruled over it during 
thirty-three years of unexampled prosperity 
and peace. The next line tells how the armies 
of the Emperor Justinian, reigning over the 
Eastern Empire at Constantinople, capture Ra- 
venna from the Ostrogoths and unite her to the 
Roman Empire, whose vassal she remains until 
she is wrested in turn from the Romans by the 
Lombards, and from the Lombards by the 
Franks under Pepin who, sweeping down with 
his hosts, changes the tide of continental history 
and presents Ravenna to the Holy See. Here 
a familiar name catches our eye, and we read 
of Charlemagne sailing up the harbor with his 
fleet, stripping Theodoric's palace of its treas- 
ures and returning to the north to build the ca- 
thedral of Aix la Chapelle in the image of San 
Vitale. Twice we learn of kings and popes at 
war over Ravenna, while Ghibellines and 
Guelphs, fighting their unceasing battles, spill 
fresh blood on her plains. Later Ravenna, 
taking matters into her own hands, insists 
on being governed by her own dukes, but after 
a period of home rule which lasted about a 
hundred and twenty years, she appears in a 
new role as a part of the Republic of Venice, 
remaining thus until almost a century later, 
when that war-like pope and patron of Raphael, 
Julius II, captures her again for the Holy See, 



THE ITALY OF OUR DREAMS 199 

which continues with slight interruptions to hold 
her until the year i860, when this ancient and 
harassed city finally becomes a part of the new 
kingdom of Italy under Victor Emmanuel. 

The tale occasionally shifts, and it is a relief 
to read how poor Dante, to whom exile from 
his Florence must have been a more cruel fate 
than any he had pictured in his " Inferno," was 
received here by the reigning duke with royal 
honors. Moreover, his grave x is still here, not 
far from the spot where the martyred Bishop 
Appolinaris, friend and disciple of Peter, was 
buried; while close by, in the splendid mauso- 
leum of the Empress Galla Placida, lie the 
ashes of her brother, the Emperor Honorius, 
and her husband, the Emperor Constantine III, 
in those marble sarcophagi which are the only 
monuments of the emperors of ancient Rome 
that still remain in their original positions. 

Even in Ravenna, however, with so many il- 
lustrations close at hand, it seems impossible 
to unravel all the separate threads of this tan- 
gled story or to keep individuals and dynasties 
in their proper places. At times this confusion 

1 One recalls Ravenna's proud answer when some hun- 
dreds of years after Dante's death Florence erected a costly- 
cenotaph in the Church of Santa Croce and calmly requested 
the return of his ashes : " You exiled Dante when in life 
and set a price upon his head. With us he found a home 
and grave, and here he shall remain forever." 



200 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

amounts almost to sacrilege, as when, for in- 
stance, we find the pious Empress Galla Placida 
actually forced to rub elbows with a very mod- 
ern countess of our own day, the friend of Lord 
Byron. But just at this point we skip some 
fine print in brackets (about Lord Byron's es- 
capades, which isn't very edifying reading and 
which after all doesn't concern Italy's history) 
to find the name of Garibaldi written in great 
capital letters. For near that forest close by 
Ravenna, whose beauty Boccaccio sang, Gari- 
baldi made his crowning sacrifice to Italy. Not 
that he laid down his own life ; that would have 
been easy, for heroes were dropping round him 
like falling leaves in autumn. But there in a 
lonely house in the marshes where he was in hid- 
ing from the Austrians, he left all that was mor- 
tal of his wife, Anita, who had followed him 
over so many bloody fields of battle and who at 
last, in utter want and destitution, died, another 
martyr to Italy. 

In the room where he had stood hopeless 
and helpless, I recalled the words of the Ro- 
man soldier who stood by the Cross but could 
not fathom its meaning: "He saved others, 
Himself He cannot save." Garibaldi helped 
save Italy, but Anita he could not save. Her 
death was the price of her love for him ; it was 
the price of his love for Italy; and surely no 



THE ITALY OF OUR DREAMS 201 

sublimer sacrifice was ever offered up on the 
altar of country than this which these lovers of 
each other and of Italy made in the name of 
their love. 

There is a bas-relief on the monument to 
Garibaldi and Anita in Ravenna which shows 
him landing among the sand hills by the sea, 
carrying her in his arms, straining his eyes in 
the darkness and desolation for some shelter 
where she may bring forth her child. Another 
bas-relief gives the sequel — Garibaldi stand- 
ing beside the bed where she lies dead. As he 
stood by that bedside and witnessed the divine 
tragedy of death struggling to bring forth life, 
was he thinking, I wonder, of that other sacra- 
ment of birth by which Italy, after so many 
years of holy travail and supremest suffering, 
was in the end to be brought forth? 

Yielding to the entreaties of the inhabitants 
of the house whom his further stay compro- 
mised, after a tragic council of war, Gari- 
baldi was forced to hurry away, leaving stran- 
gers to bury Anita in the marsh-land by the 
sea, while the winds sighed in the trees her only 
requiem. Almost mad with grief, he made 
his way with the aid of a faithful guide along 
the coast, sometimes hiding in the tall Indian 
corn that grows among the marshes, or plung- 
ing deep into the sheltering gloom of the pine 



202 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

forests, occasionally snatching a few hours' sleep 
in some trusty peasant's hut, " his life handed 
on with religious devotion from one poor man 
to another," while bands of bloodthirsty Aus- 
trians hunted him everywhere in vain. For 
amongst all the Italian peasants who knew of 
his hiding, there was not found one Judas to 
betray him. The Austrians had set a kingly 
ransom on his head, but God had sealed this 
man with his own seal, and through all the en- 
suing years of constant peril and deadly danger 
he was " kept " to finish that work which has 
made his name immortal. 

As the tides of the sea over which she once 
aspired to rule have receded gradually from 
Ravenna, the tide of history has likewise with- 
drawn and left this city, the scene of such 
mighty conflicts, alone among her memories and 
her ruins. One glory of her past, however, re- 
mains to her, untouched by time or tide. 
Those glowing mosaics of Biblical scenes which 
no modern craft can rival have lost none of 
their radiance in the thousand or more years 
they have kept their watch over Ravenna. In 
their characteristic absence of any reference to 
the Cross or the sorrows of Christ, they still 
bear witness to the passionate conviction of 
those early Christians, so many of whom were 



THE ITALY OF OUR DREAMS 203 

martyrs, that the negative side of the Christian 
life — the sufferings and sacrifices — are not 
worthy to be compared with the positive joys 
it brings. 

These mosaics, showing as they do the high 
water mark of Italian Byzantine art, proved an 
excellent preparation for our study at Padua 
of the work of Giotto, the first non-imitative, 
creative genius among Italian artists. His 
series of frescoes here gave me one of the sen- 
sations of my life. In thinking now of Padua, 
so rich in legacies from the past, all her other 
treasures, — the carvings by Donatello in her 
great cathedral, the statuesque frescoes by Man- 
tegna which are among the rare remaining 
works of that master of form and perspective, 
even the great equestrian statue of Gautemala, 
which many critics claim has no rival, — seem 
to me to sink into comparative insignificance 
beside that series of frescoes from the life of 
our Lord which covers the four walls of the 
little Arena Chapel set in its quiet garden. 
Faulty in technique, often childish in execution, 
there is yet a sublimity in the treatment of 
these scenes that is worthy of their majestic 
theme, worthy also of the master whose legacy 
to the world was a vitally new conception of art 
and life, and who threw open the gates for 



20 4 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

Michael Angelo and Raphael to enter in and 
possess the land of promise his genius had fore- 
shadowed. 

Our visit to Padua formed the last link in 
that chain of golden days which made up this 
springtime in Italy. In Ravenna, where Dante 
died; in Assisi, where St. Francis lived; and in 
Padua, where, as in Assisi, Giotto's frescoes 
still live: we seemed almost to have come into 
personal contact with these mediaeval giants who 
sum up in themselves and have expressed for all 
time the soul of the Middle Ages. In those 
few short months how many centuries our im- 
aginations had traversed! On what far jour- 
neys had they gone, back into that other spring- 
time of Italy's history when these men were 
coming to flower: Dante, Giotto, St. Francis 
— first fruits of Italy's resurrection, when after 
her sleep of centuries she awoke to newness of 
life in literature, in art and in religion, flooding 
the world with a light that has never since been 
darkened. 



CHAPTER XIII 
RAMBLES IN SWITZERLAND 

The trip in early summer from Italy into 
Switzerland, through the Italian lakes by boat 
and over the Alps by diligence, is only less 
memorable than the reverse trip in the early 
spring from the snows and storms north of the 
Alps down into the flowers and sunshine of 
Italy. 

On crossing the Simplon Pass early one June, 
we were surprised to find that the runners had 
been taken off the diligence only a week before, 
and that even yet our road ran for miles 
through deep cuts in the snow and occasionally 
through long tunnels in the solid ice. In one 
place we had to walk, or rather climb, over the 
wreckage of an immense avalanche which had 
swept through the valley two days before, chok- 
ing up the road and devastating everything in 
its path. A forest of gigantic pines had been 
mowed down as with a scythe, while a half- 
dozen peasant families, together with their 
houses and farms, were still lying beneath fifty 

feet of snow and rock. 

205 



206 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

Although Nature has undoubtedly been to 
the Swiss a stern and sometimes even cruel 
mother, she has at least developed in them as 
racial characteristics certain hardy virtues for 
which one looks in vain among people bred in 
more enervating climates. 

On crossing the Italian frontier into Switzer- 
land, one is sensible almost immediately of a 
change in the psychic atmosphere, of a spiritual 
and physical invigoration from a new ethical 
ozone in the air. For a time one revels in the 
wonders of Italy nor counts the cost, but after 
a few months spent in warding off beggars, 
hunting out overcharges and refusing bad 
money, the exasperated traveler often is 
tempted to judge the entire Italian nation by 
the cabmen, hotel porters, guides and beggars 
with whom he comes into direct daily contact, 
and thus not infrequently he ends by getting the 
impression, which is manifestly unjust and ab- 
surd, that every Italian from prince to pauper 
is a miniature Machiavelli who lies and steals 
from centuries of inherited instinct. This is 
the psychological moment to start north and 
seek repose in a land where honesty is as nearly 
universal as is the ability to drive a shrewd bar- 
gain. 

Perhaps the first sociological observation the 
average tourist makes on entering Swiss terri- 



RAMBLES IN SWITZERLAND 207 

tory is that the land is as free from beggars as 
Ireland is from snakes. I am sure that every- 
one who has had occasion to travel to any ex- 
tent in foreign lands will admit that whoever 
may be responsible for this immunity from beg- 
gars deserves an even higher place than St. 
Patrick in the Calendar of saints. A man has 
a fair chance to defend himself against a viper, 
but what can the most intrepid do with the 
beggars of Italy or the Orient but " pay, pay, 
pay," or submit to their intolerable unceasing 
and ever-increasing importunities? Often at 
the frontier of Italy, or even of France, beg- 
gars are to be seen gathered like flies and mos- 
quitoes on a window screen in summer, unable 
to get in, but ever ready to pounce upon you as 
you come out. 

To be sure, the poor are to be found in Swit- 
zerland as elsewhere, especially in the cities, 
but the Swiss government has made a more 
serious effort than has that of any other nation, 
with the possible exception of New Zealand, to 
grapple with the omnipresent problem of pov- 
erty. By its system of technical education, its 
war upon intemperance, its free employment bu- 
reaus, relief stations, and labor colonies, its ex- 
periments with insurance against idleness, and 
its increasingly successful policy of more funda- 
mental social reconstruction, much has been 



208 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

done to abolish contributing causes of poverty 
and to circumscribe its ravages. Moreover, 
by means of well-organized charity, both pub- 
lic and private, the hopeless but worthy indigent 
are probably better cared for in Switzerland 
than anywhere else in the world. Indeed, so 
much is being written and said these days about 
the various splendid activities of the Swiss gov- 
ernment that Swiss reforms and the triumphs 
of Swiss statecraft will soon be as well known 
and as universally admired as is the grandeur 
of Swiss scenery. 

During my last summer in Switzerland, 
though I had occasion to visit all parts of the 
country looking up various matters connected 
with some economic and sociological investiga- 
tions, on the whole I found nothing which in- 
terested me more than the little abonnement 
ticket on which I was traveling. It was good 
for a two weeks' continuous journey on the 
lake steamboats and great railway lines in all 
parts of Switzerland; it cost $7.50; and, need- 
less to add, perhaps, it was a third-class ticket. 
When first introduced, it was feared that the 
almost nominal price of these tickets, while en- 
tirely satisfactory from the standpoint of the 
public, would prove a losing venture to the rail- 
way department; but the resulting increase in 



RAMBLES IN SWITZERLAND 209 

travel soon demonstrated what railway man- 
agers seem so loath to learn, that within certain 
reasonable limits cheap rates are always a pay- 
ing venture. 

On one's first trip abroad he is apt to travel 
first class as a matter of course, — or of pride — 
or of prejudice; then next time, by going sec- 
ond one manifests to the traveling public that 
the novitiate period is over and that one has 
flowered into a full-fledged globe-trotter of the 
second degree. On later trips many of us learn 
that it is wiser to discriminate; to travel first 
class on long journeys, when fast trains and 
ample room are a consideration; to travel sec- 
ond class when in the mood for bourgeois com- 
forts, bourgeois companionship, and bourgeois 
prices; and sometimes to " travel third " for the 
charm of the company to be met in third class 
compartments only ! Here one comes into con- 
tact with the real people ; with their naive ways, 
their fresh, truthful views of life, with much of 
the local color and some of the local odors of 
their native villages still clinging to them. 
Time passes quickly watching them. They are 
as unconventional and refreshing as children. 
As someone dryly remarked, on being asked 
why he " traveled third " ; " I travel third class 
because there is no fourth." 



210 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

But in Switzerland the way par excellence to 
get about the country, if one has the time and 
energy, is not by means of its railways, nor of 
its splendid system of diligences, nor yet by au- 
tomobile, but simply and joyfully on foot, for 
in order to see Switzerland aright one must 
use his feet as well as his eyes. One summer 
which we devoted to doing Switzerland, or 
rather a part of it, in this primitive fashion, I 
still recall with a keen sense of exhilaration and 
delight. 

Early one morning about the middle of June, 
with heavy hobnailed boots on our feet, stout 
walking-sticks in our hands, and a mountain- 
eer's knapsack on my back, we set forth to walk 
from Thusis over the Julier Pass into the En- 
gadine. Toward noon we snatched an hour's 
nap at a wayside inn, after lunching on brook 
trout fresh from the water, and vegetables 
fresh from the earth. We stopped for the 
night in a little mountain village where the 
charges at the hotel for breakfast and a large 
corner room with polished hardwod floor, hand- 
woven and hand-embroidered linen sheets, and 
three daintily curtained windows framing mag- 
nificent panoramas of snow mountains and cas- 
cades, amounted to forty-eight cents each — the 
picturesque little proprietress apologetically ex- 
plaining to us that the extras which we had so 



RAMBLES IN SWITZERLAND 211 

recklessly incurred in the way of eggs and jam 
for breakfast were responsible for the swollen 
proportions of the bill. 

It seemed like flying in the face of Provi- 
dence to hurry away at once, so, yielding to the 
protest of our tired feet and the combined 
charms of the place, the proprietress and the 
prices, we stopped another day in this little 
patch of Paradise, and started off next morning, 
refreshed in body and soul, for our three days' 
trip by easy stages down into the valley of the 
Engadine. 

Taking up our headquarters at St. Mortiz, 
we walked all over this enchanting region, see- 
ing it in its most perfect season — the month of 
flowers — when the fields are shot with every 
color of the rainbow, and Alpine roses run riot 
over all the hills, while starry gentians make 
their part of the earth as blue as the sky, and 
pansies and buttercups in the valley spread a 
cloth of pure gold for one's feet. 

After two weeks of perfect weather, a 
drenching rain held us and a few other tourists 
weatherbound for five days, during which a part 
of our surplus time was consecrated by common 
consent to neglected correspondence. Two let- 
ters, written by a couple of Oxford undergradu- 
ates, were triumphs respectively of brevity and 
the constructive imagination. One of these fel- 



212 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

lows, a young giant with apparently more mus- 
cle than mentality, seeing everybody else writ- 
ing, endeavored to yield himself likewise to the 
epistolary muse, and seizing a pen, wrote a col- 
lege chum: 

Dear B., I write you because I have nothing else to 
do and (five minutes' hard thinking failing to evolve 
anything more) stop because I have nothing else to say. 
Yours in haste. 

His companion was more fertile. At the 
desk he bought some paper decorated with 
glistening lithographs of mountains, lakes, 
and glaciers, and wrote to a wealthy invalid 
aunt, well known for her perennial acidity of 
temper, as follows: 

The day is like a dream of Paradise. The moun- 
tains are so enticing in their radiant garments, woven 
of snow and sunbeams, that it seems almost a sacrilege 
to stay indoors. Yet I cannot let the day go by with- 
out sending you a breath from this bright world, with- 
out attempting in my feeble way to share with you the 
glory and gladness that are mine but which cannot be 
fully mine until I know that they are partly yours. 
How I wish that you were with me! 

then shuddering as the sky grew blacker and the 
air damper and more depressing: 

The day only needs you here to give the scene com- 
pleteness. As we cannot see this fair country together, 



RAMBLES IN SWITZERLAND 213 

however, I shall live in the hope of sometime making 
excursions with you in that land, of which this is but 
a faint intimation, where travel is without fatigue, the 
days without clouds, and the hotels are kept by the 
angels ! 

Holding the letter out of the window he 
caught a raindrop and wrote under it, " Pardon 
this tear." 

From St. Moritz we set out for a week's 
walking trip to Andermatt through one of the 
least tourist-spoiled regions of Switzerland, 
stoping en route at little chalet hotels where we 
ate, drank, and slept with all the joy and some 
of the power of the virile, voracious races of 
primitive man. At the top of the Oberalp Pass 
the proprietor of the hotel welcomed us as 
Noah might have welcomed the dove that re- 
turned to the ark with the first signs of dry land. 
Thus far, the poor man told us, his season had 
been so superlatively bad that his family had 
been obliged to eat meat! As we were some- 
what puzzled by this paradoxical utterance, he 
hastened to explain that in the absence of guests 
(and I might add cold storage facilities) there 
was nothing to do with the supply of meat on 
hand but to allow the family to eat it. Judging 
from his attitude, we could imagine the sort of 
chastened pleasure with which the household 



2i 4 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

must have partaken of this feast, which, while 
it undoubtedly ministered to their carnal satis- 
faction, betokened their financial undoing. 

From the Pass we made a side excursion to 
little Lake Toma — the source of the Rhone 
— on our way down to Andermatt where we 
inspected, as much as is allowable by foreign- 
ers, the splendid fortifications which the Swiss 
promptly erected on the St. Gothard Pass when 
Italian imperialism threatened to rob them of 
their Italian-speaking cantons. The Swiss army 
is one of the most remarkable of her po- 
litical institutions. It is the idea towards which 
the common people of every European country, 
weighed down with taxes for huge standing 
armies, turn with longing and hope. The Swiss 
have a wonderful system of militia which saves 
millions of money to the tax-payers and years 
of freedom from military service to the soldiers. 
Practically all Swiss serve in the militia and re- 
serves. The training thus received would be 
insufficient, were it not preceded and supple- 
mented by military training for boys in school 
and rifle practice every year by virtually the en- 
tire male population of the country. 

In this highly original and economical way 
little Switzerland, with a population of less 
than three millions of people, actually has al- 
ways at her beck and call an army of 337,000 



RAMBLES IN SWITZERLAND 215 

of the most martial soldiers of Europe, armed, 
equipped, and ready to take the field at an 
hour's notice. 

Leaving Andermatt, we crossed the Furka 
Pass into the Rhone valley, and in the course 
of the summer we walked over a number of 
other passes : — the Albula, Briinig, Gemmi, 
Meiden, Augstburg, Tete Noir, — each with its 
own special variety of Alpine scenery, — but 
none of them opened up to view a panorama 
which could at all compare in grandeur of form 
and mass and mysterious beauty of color and 
shade with that which stretched out before us 
as we reached the summit of the Furka and 
looked westward over miles of glaciers, inter- 
twined with green valleys and surrounded on 
all sides by chain after chain of snow-covered, 
cloud-capped mountains, bathed for the mo- 
ment in an ocean of sunset glory. 

On our walking trips it was interesting to 
watch the faces of people who passed us in dili- 
gences, carriages and automobiles: some, as 
they whirled by, looked down upon us with plu- 
tocratic scorn; others, with indifference or sur- 
prise; but those who realized what they were 
missing must have envied us as we strode 
along, inhaling great draughts of pure ozone; 
stopping to rest, or read, or eat, or sleep wher- 
ever and whenever we wished; and always car- 



216 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

rying with us the exultant sense of personal, 
physical triumph over this proud old Alpine 
world. 

But we were by no means total abstainers 
from occasional drives, which lent added zest 
to our tramps. One drive which we took over 
the Grimsel Pass is indelibly impressed on my 
memory. Having blistered our feet on the trip 
to the Grimsel Hospice, we limped ignomini- 
ously into the hostelry and requested the pro- 
prietor to send us some liniment. Quickly tak- 
ing advantage of the situation, he inquired 
whether we would not like a carriage for the 
rest of our journey to Meiringen. " It is not 
much more expensive than the diligence," he 
explained, " and of course there are many ad- 
vantages in having one's own private equi- 
page." After our dusty pull over the Pass, the 
picture he drew of us rolling along in luxury 
proved so attractive that we at once fell in with 
the suggestion and ordered a carriage for three 
o'clock. 

When our turn-out was announced we de- 
scended in state, preceded by the porter, the 
concierge, the proprietor and the head waiter, 
all of whom had lent their distinguished serv- 
ices in the matter of the carriage transaction 
and had been rewarded accordingly. So great 
was our consternation on being told that the 



RAMBLES IN SWITZERLAND 217 

rickety victoria drawn by a braying mule which 
stood at the door was our much-vaunted " equi- 
page," and so ludicrous was the whole situa- 
tion, that we were too nonplussed to protest. 
Moreover, the mule was braying so vigorously 
that any remarks we might have made would 
have been hopelessly swallowed up in the noisy 
confusion of our exit. The moment we took 
our seats the antiquated coachman, who at least 
was in perfect keeping with his property, gave 
a resounding crack to his whip and we were 
off! 

Such a ride as we had that afternoon would 
be hard to duplicate at any price. The road 
twisted and writhed along the precipitous side 
of a deep gorge through which poured a roar- 
ing mountain torrent. This gorge was suffi- 
ciently awe-inspiring even when contemplated 
from a safe distance, but our mule had no idea 
of remaining at a safe distance — his one 
thought seeming to be to leap the precipice, 
while the driver's frantic efforts to frustrate 
these suicidal and homicidal attempts were 
badly seconded by a pair of feeble and worn- 
looking reins, and a brake which at critical mo- 
ments refused to work, thus precipitating the 
carriage upon the already greatly overwrought 
and by this time almost hysterical mule. 

Every time we rounded a corner we held our 



218 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

breath in terror, for turning corners in this turn- 
out was a painfully precarious performance. 
When the prancing mule had safely accom- 
plished the turn, the crisis was by no means 
past, since the carriage wheels were suffering 
from some internal disorder that made them 
slide and slip, wobble and pitch forward rather 
than roll, while the harness, being pieced with 
ends of rope and bits of string, was in imminent 
danger of collapsing. 

About an hour after we had started, hearing 
the diligence with its six sure-footed horses 
coming up behind us at full speed, we modestly 
directed our driver to turn aside, hoping the 
passengers would be enjoying the scenery too 
much to have any eyes for us. But just as the 
diligence came abreast of our " equipage " the 
mule, having no taste for obscurity, lifted up 
his voice high above the noise of the waters; 
and the startled tourists, turning with one ac- 
cord to look back at us, passed speedily out of 
our sight and hearing in a gale of laughter. 
By this time, suffering more from wounded 
pride than from blistered feet, we mechanically 
repeated the words of the hotel proprietor: 
" A carriage is not much more expensive than 
the diligence, and of course there are many ad- 
vantages in having one's own private equi- 
page." 



RAMBLES IN SWITZERLAND 219 

The last days of summer were now gone, 
and according to our original plan our pedes- 
trian tour had come to an end. But when the 
time came to get into a stuffy train at Meirin- 
gen and return to the smoke and bustle of civili- 
zation, we decided that it was impossible to 
leave Switzerland without at least one snow 
mountain to our credit. Accordingly, instead 
of securing railway tickets, we engaged two 
guides and set off for the Ewigschneehorn, a 
mountain which is only 11,000 feet high, but 
which commands one of the finest panoramas 
in the High Alps and in good weather, accord- 
ing to Baedeker, " presents little difficulty to 
adepts." Unfortunately, however, by thus 
starting from a point only 2,000 feet above sea- 
level we gave ourselves a climb of 9,000 feet, 
which is over 2,000 feet more than from the 
Eggishorn hotel to the top of the Jungfrau. 
Moreover, about an hour after leaving Meirin- 
gen it began to rain in the valleys and snow on- 
the mountains, thus doubling the difficulties and 
dangers of our trip, and transforming a com- 
paratively simple climb into a formidable " first- 
class ascension." We slept the night on straw 
between huge woolen blankets in an Alpine hut 
built by the Swiss Alpine Club for the free use 
of all passers-by. As we were drenched from 
walking all day in the rain, and there was 



220 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

barely enough wood on hand to make tea and 
heat our canned soup, we were forced next 
morning at four o'clock to get into our icy 
clothes and with chattering teeth to continue 
our trip over five glaciers and through eighteen 
inches of new-fallen snow to the summit. 
There is nothing more dangerous on such trips 
than this new-fallen snow, which conceals the 
crevasses yawning in the glaciers beneath. We 
were all roped together and as the head guide 
sounded the snow with his ice axe every step 
of the way, our progress necessarily was slow 
and monotonous. But when by means of his 
ice axe he suddenly discovered that we were on 
the brink of a snow-covered crevasse which was 
a veritable death trap, we realized that his pre- 
cautions were neither perfunctory nor exces- 
sive. A few minutes later an avalanche carry- 
ing tons of snow, ice and boulders came tear- 
ing down about five yards to our right, but so 
stimulated were we by the altitude and the nov- 
elty of the situation that we felt no emotion 
save a sort of intoxication of ecstasy and awe. 
Every hour we ate a sandwich, drank a glass 
of tea and red wine mixed, and rested five min- 
utes standing. Then on and on we pushed 
doggedly, the last half-hour including a very in- 
teresting bit of " rock work." When at last, 
however, we reached the summit, the dangers 



RAMBLES IN SWITZERLAND 221 

and fatigues of the way were completely for- 
gotten in the strange sublimity of the view. 
In every direction, as far as the eye could reach, 
was a region of dazzling white, of lifeless, end- 
less winter. We were tired and cold and hun- 
gry and wet, but our keenest, our dominant 
sensation was one of exhilaration. A new as- 
pect of Nature had been opened to view. Cold 
she was and cruel in this mood, but incompara- 
bly beautiful and pure. And when at last we 
turned our faces toward the familiar lower lev- 
els, it was with a feeling of exultation that this 
once, at least, it had been our privilege to tread 
these corridors of flowing ice, to hear the thun- 
ders of the avalanche, to gaze face to face upon 
the Jungfrau, the Queen of the Bernese Alps, 
with her court of snowy giants, and to enter, as 
it were, the very Holy of Holies of this mighty 
temple of Nature to which pilgrims flock from 
all the ends of the earth — a temple not built 
with hands, whiter than marble, as enduring as 
the world itself, and reaching to the very heav- 
ens. 



CHAPTER XIV 
AN AWAKENING 

Several years ago, during a summer spent in 
Champel, Geneva's most attractive suburb, a 
family of gossipy robins got me into the habit 
of waking at five in the morning. This would 
have been a sad predicament in some places, 
but in Switzerland the law of compensation 
came to my rescue, and if I was cheated out of 
my sleep, at least the opportunity was given me 
to enjoy some memorable walks and to get the 
benefit of those famous Swiss sunrises which 
add their touch of morning glory to the lake 
and mountains around Geneva. 

The house we were living in was a quaint 
eighteenth century villa that had been set down 
in a beautiful park by the Italian ancestors of 
our hostess some two hundred years ago. If 
I am not mistaken, it was the same year that 
the ancestors of the robins settled in the oak 
tree under my window. While I was only a 
bird of passage myself, I had been in Geneva 
long enough to absorb some of that spirit of 
profound reverence for all members of all old 

222 



AN AWAKENING 223 

families which still clings like a faint aroma of 
her feudal past about this very democratic city. 
Probably that is why I got up meekly when the 
robins woke me and went out to see the sun rise 
instead of evicting them from their ancestral 
nest, as I might have been tempted to do in 
America. 

One morning as I walked down to the Jardin 
des Anglais to watch the sun rise across the 
lake, the streets seemed very deserted until I 
came within sight of the steamer landing, where 
a crowd had gathered waiting for the early 
boat. As I strolled towards them, thinking to 
find some energetic compatriots propelled by 
Cook, I was surprised to discover instead, a 
company of poorly-dressed men and women 
standing on the pier waving handkerchiefs and 
shouting messages to a lot of little boys and 
girls on the boat, who were waving and shout- 
ing in reply. 

There was about the scene something of the 
bustle and excitement of a Hoboken pier when 
an ocean-liner is preparing to start. In answer 
to my query, a little pale-faced woman nearby 
explained that this was the annual departure of 
poor children sent for a month's outing to the 
mountains and country by the Geneva branch of 
the Swiss Vacation Colonies. The decks were 
swarming with children, each child, with his 



224 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

traveling outfit done up in a sack or a big hand- 
kerchief, feeling and looking as important as 
though he were embarking for a journey around 
the world. Everybody seemed to enter into 
the spirit of the thing, and from dear old white- 
haired Monsieur Mittendorf — who collected 
the tickets as the little travelers arrived, and 
pinned on the magic blue or pink or yellow rib- 
bon which checked each child safely through to 
his or her destination — down to the big police- 
man who kept order, and the crew who were 
peeping out of the port-hole windows, everybody 
was excited and happy. To be sure there were 
the inevitable tears shed by a few of the chil- 
dren whose hearts failed them when the whistle 
blew and the gang-plank was drawn on board, 
and I noticed more than one mother using her 
handkerchief alternately to brush away tears 
and to wave encouragingly at some small figure 
which she seemed still able to distinguish after 
all the little figures were only one blur to me. 
But the tears that were shed that morning were 
the kind that flowed from the fountains of joy, 
as a woman explained to a sailor who was good- 
naturedly chaffing her for laughing and crying 
in the same breath. 

The crowd on the pier, of fathers and moth- 
ers who had snatched just time enough from 



AN AWAKENING 225 

their work to wave a farewell to their children 
who were going off to play, interested me al- 
most more than the ship's load of fortunate 
little unfortunates. 

As I stood there thinking how strange it was 
that those who do the world's hardest work 
should be so often the very ones who never get 
a vacation, the little pale-faced woman at my 
side confided to me with a flush of excitement 
that she too was to have an outing. Indeed, 
her little girl had been accepted this year chiefly 
in order that the mother, relieved of her care, 
could be sent for a few months' rest to one of 
those convalescent homes which are to be found 
on the outskirts of nearly every Swiss city of 
any size, and where for one franc a day, poor 
people dismissed from hospitals, or those who 
have been dragged down by the year's burdens, 
may enjoy a season of quiet country life and 
have a chance to lay the foundation of new 
strength for the winter's tasks. 

One man I noticed in the crowd waving to a 
little pinched-looking boy on the boat. The 
band of crepe on his hat corresponding to a 
black band on the child's sleeve told the pitiful 
story and gave one a hint of what it must mean 
to this little chap to be mothered for a few 
weeks at least by some warm-hearted peasant 



226 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

in the country. The man's face was drawn and 
haggard; he leaned heavily against the pier, 
waving his hand to the last, but the effort seemed 
to tire him, and after the boat was well off and 
the crowd gone he stood there still leaning 
against the pier, gazing listlessly across the 
lake. Suddenly rousing himself, he glanced at 
the tower clock, saw it was five minutes to seven, 
and picking up a chest of tools at his feet, 
dragged himself wearily off in the direction of 
his work. 

I spoke to him as he was going. " He will 
surely have a happy time in the country, your 
boy." He looked at me a moment dumbly, 
then as if more to himself than to me, said: 
" Yes, happier than at the house; there is not 
much happiness there now surely. I don't know 
what would have become of him alone all day; 
yes, the country is better than an alley when 
school is out and the mother is gone. It has 
been a good thought of someone to help me 
with the boy. It makes me feel that God may 
be good, after all." He pulled his cap down 
over his eyes shamefacedly, as if he had said 
too much, and not giving me a chance to reply, 
wished me good day. As I watched him, a 
queer, envious wish came into my heart; I 
wished I had been the particular person who 
had given the money that had gone to buy that 



AN AWAKENING 227 

boy's outing, that had — if one may put it that 
way — helped to buy back this man's faith in 
God. 

Later on in the day I dropped in at the office 

of Mr. S , the man who had first mentioned 

the Vacation Colonies to me, to ask a few ques- 
tions about the work of the Society. Mr. 

S has two hobbies — vacation colonies and 

golf, and he abounds in statistics as to both. 
He insists he can enjoy his own vacation on 
Scottish links with an easier conscience if he has 
helped someone else to a summer's outing, and 
I believe it was about him that I heard some 
gossip to the effect that when he and his family 
take a pleasure trip, the exact amount they 
spend on themselves is set aside to give some 
poor people a vacation. While the idea is 
original it seems to work well all around, and 
when he told me that he was starting for Scot- 
land the next week, I thought instinctively of 
the little pale-faced sewing-woman and won- 
dered if her outing had any connection with his. 

He took my interest in the children as a 
matter of course, evidently thinking it the re- 
sult of a talk he had had with me one afternoon 
two weeks before in the street car going out to 
Champel. Naturally, he had no means of 
knowing that, while seemingly listening to him 
that afternoon, I had been thinking all the time 



228 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

of a Paris hat I had just bought at a great bar- 
gain and was wearing home in triumph. I my- 
self recalled distinctly how on that occasion the 
glass window halfway open, against which he 
leaned as he talked, had served as a mirror 
where I could catch occasional glimpses of how 
becoming the hat really was. " And such a 
bargain," I had kept repeating to myself com- 
placently as he had talked of the children — " a 
real Alphonsine hat — forty dollars, reduced 
to twenty-one fifty, almost given away," as the 
milliner had assured me. I recalled guiltily 

how Monsieur S had beamed on me as he 

got off the car that afternoon. " When peo- 
ple really are interested, I can talk for hours 
about those children," he had said; " you must 
come into my office some day and let me tell 
you more." 

It had not occurred to me at the time that I 
would ever care to accept that invitation, but 
here I was now, more to my own surprise, evi- 
dently, than to his, asking for the promised in- 
formation. He launched out on the subject 
with fresh enthusiasm, and this time, you may 
be sure, I made a great effort to concentrate on 
the statistics he was giving me; so many chil- 
dren sent, so many francs expended, so many 
days passed, so much average increase in weight 
per child, etc. 



AN AWAKENING 229 

But, strange to say, the vision of that same 
hat again intruded itself between him and me as 
he talked, and as he, stimulated by my apparent 
interest, enlarged on the subject, giving me sta- 
tistics of other cantons and other years, I kept 
thinking about hats bought at different seasons 
and in other countries — hats that I remem- 
bered, with a shudder, had not been " bar- 
gains," since I had paid the full market price 
for the name sewed on the inside and for that 
indescribable air on the outside which gives to 
the well-dressed woman what Emerson calls 
" that sense of inward peace which religion is 
powerless to bestow." But this time neither 
the thought of my clothes, nor my religion, 
brought me any peace. My religion seemed to 
be mocking me and those hats fairly haunted 
me. They piled themselves up in my memory, 
one high above the other; such quantities there 
were — several every year — and they seemed 
to arrange themselves in the form of a monu- 
ment — one huge monument for a lot of little 
graves of children whose lives might have been 
saved with a part of the money which they had 
cost ! 

I got up suddenly, interrupting Monsieur 

S , for from thinking of hats I was getting 

started on dressmakers' bills, and I felt that I 
should go crazy if I began to calculate how 



230 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

many children could have been sent to the coun- 
try for the price of one Paris gown. He was 
just concluding: "It is hard to draw the line 
taut and refuse little pinched children for lack 
of a small sum, for you see how far a little 
money can be made to go in this work." 

" Yes," I answered slowly, as I finished some 
tentative scribbling on the back of my check- 
book, " I see — one child for one month at one 
franc a day; thirty francs, or six dollars cash 
expenditure. One month of country air, one 
month of good, nourishing food, and a chance 
to get a head start on the high road to health 
again; besides," I continued, remembering that 
father's words, " returns mental and spiritual 
that one cannot calculate. As you say, you can 
make a little money go a long way — I should 
like to see if a little money that was going as far 
as Paris can't be made to go a little farther still 
in your hands." 

As I was leaving he handed me some leaflets 
giving the statistics of all the Vacation Colonies 
in Switzerland for 1904, and as I read how this 
one society had given an outing that year to 
over forty-three hundred poor children, while 
many more had been sent to the country or 
taken for daily afternoon excursions by other 
societies, I wondered how the statistics of one 
American city — say New York, for instance 



AN AWAKENING 231 

— with about the same population as all of 
Switzerland, would compare with these. Cer- 
tainly the need of city children in America to 
be got out of reeking tenement-house districts 
is infinitely greater than that of Swiss children, 
whose condition cannot begin to be compared 
in misery and poverty with theirs. I recalled 
an article which had failed to make much of an 
impression on me at the time, in which Jacob 
Riis made a plea for the four or five thousand 
children in New York tenements alone, " crip- 
pled and maimed by that terrible scourge of ill- 
nourished childhood — bone tuberculosis — 
of whom only one in a hundred " ever gets a 
chance to prove how God's fresh air can work 
its work of healing. 

I thought of the sixty thousand such children 
he mentioned, scattered over the United States, 
criminally neglected; most of whom are left to 
die or to grow up stunted and deformed, as well 
as to spread broadcast the contagion of their 
malady. I thought of the thousands upon 
thousands of other children in New York City 

— weak and ill-fed, but not yet diseased — 
stifling in the back-tenement districts, with never 
a breath of pure, fresh air, nor a glimpse of the 
sea which is so close that it laps the very shores 
of the great island city. I thought of the mis- 
ery of the factory children in different parts of 



232 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

America, unprotected by the state, driven by 
the grim taskmaster, Poverty, to drag out a life 
that is worse than death. I seemed suddenly 
to hear a chorus of these children's voices call- 
ing from across the ocean, to see myriads of lit- 
tle hands stretched vainly out for help, and my 
face flushed with righteous indignation to think 
that America should fall so far short of little 
Switzerland in caring for its future citizens and 
rulers. 

Was there, indeed, no way out of their mis- 
ery, I asked myself; was no response being 
made to their cry? I recalled vaguely that 
great movements were going forward for the 
protection of children, and for their rescue from 
vicious surroundings. Then suddenly it oc- 
curred to me to stop generalizing on so vast a 
scale and to bring the subject nearer home; to 
lay less emphasis on the failure of Americans 
in general, and more on the failure of one 
young American in particular, whom I, at least, 
without injustice might call to account. What 
interest or part had I taken in helping on this 
work, I asked myself. When had I ever lifted 
so much as my little jeweled finger to save one 
of the least of these little ones? Was it possi- 
ble that my own indifference could in any slight- 
est degree be held accountable for the blighting 
of one small life? And was my indifference 



AN AWAKENING 233 

the result of carelessness or ignorance, or was it 
just a flat refusal to admit that I was in any 
sense a keeper of these children — a refusal to 
take any part in their affairs, even though it 
were an affair of life or death to them? 

Gradually vague questions began to shape 
themselves in my mind, questions which a few 
months before I would have dismissed with dis- 
dain as too impractical to be worth consider- 
ing; questions, for instance, as to whether the 
unnecessarily expensive clothes on my back and 
other personal luxuries I indulged in could have 
any possible connection with the state of my 
soul. 

" Was there," I asked myself, " in all the 
mass of suffering and injustice about me, at least 
some infinitesimal part that might be wiped out 
if I were really awake, soul as well as body? 
And was it at all possible to be awake spiritu- 
ally and yet have my eyes shut to these things ? " 
I had a feeling that the answers to such ques- 
tions might upset all my comfortable theories 
as to my own personal exemption from respon- 
sibility for the misery which, paradoxical as it 
may seem, I had up to this time regarded as 
somehow a part of the divine order of things. 
But slowly it began to dawn on me that to ques- 
tions such as these my whole life could be my 
only answer. 



234 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

The thought of my poor, neglected little 
compatriots had made me half regret for a mo- 
ment that check for the Swiss children. But, 
after all, I concluded, was it not they who had 
really waked me more truly than the robins at the 
dawn of this new day? And could one who had 
slumbered in selfish ease so long, count any price 
too great for this awakening to life of that di- 
vine germ we call the Soul, through which God's 
love pours in to strengthen us only in proportion 
as our love pours out to strengthen others? 

I had gone out to see a sunrise, and a light 
that was older than the sunlight had begun to 
shine for me. I had " gained an abyss where 
a dewdrop was asked." 

I forgot to say that the sun did rise that morn- 
ing, as usual, only I was too busy thinking about 
the children, and the hats, and the statistics to 
pay much attention to it. You see the sun gets 
up every morning, everywhere, only it is not 
every day, nor everywhere that poor little chil- 
dren are bundled out of tenements and alleys 
into God's country. " Wouldn't it be good," 
I thought, " if all the little poor children could 
be as sure of their outing as that the sun would 
rise? And wouldn't it be better still if, some 
day — a day whose coming I might hasten — 
the sun would rise on a world where there were 
no little poor children at all ! " 



CHAPTER XV 
A POLITICAL PILGRIMAGE 

The personality of Switzerland like that of 
Italy is unique. But while the all-pervasive 
and dominant influence south of the Alps is 
that of art, in the little republic to their north 
the omnipresent, ever-creative 'national spirit 
is the spirit of democracy. Upon entering its 
borders the observant traveler finds himself 
lifted into an atmosphere of intellectual lib- 
erty, political equality and social justice. In 
fact, the work of this " political experiment 
station of the world " is of such incomparable 
importance that a first-hand knowledge of its 
methods and institutions has become as invalua- 
ble to the student of politics as is a personal ac- 
quaintance with the masterpieces of Italian 
painting to the student of art. 

Among the institutions in operation there, 
the most important is the Initiative and Refer- 
endum — a system of direct popular control 
of the law-making power which has been 
adopted elsewhere to a limited degree. Its 
results have attracted the attention of students 

235 



2 3 6 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

the world over, and tempted travelers to a 
more than passing inquiry. Many a tourist 
has turned amateur investigator and converted, 
as I did, his Swiss sojourn into something of a 
political pilgrimage. 

The referendum is in the air and you cannot 
escape it. You meet it at every turn; you hear 
of it in the restaurants, on steamship docks, in 
the railroad trains. Almost every chance ac- 
quaintance has at least a word to say regarding 
it. It was but a few hours after I had un- 
packed my luggage at Lucerne that I began to* 
hear of it and its benefits. Next to me at the 
table d'hote dinner sat a big raw-boned Texan 
and beside him a small Swiss gentleman with a 
pointed beard. Their conversation bore upon 
this interesting institution, which my compa- 
triot was by no means sure could be adopted 
with profit by the United States. 

" I reckon this referendum, as you call it, 
may work all right in a little two-by-four coun- 
try like yours," said the Texan, " but you 
needn't get puffed up on that account, and try 
to teach a country that can whip all Europe. " 

" I hope you will not forget," replied the 
Swiss, " that my country has a larger area than 
some of your states and a larger population 
than the average of them. Therefore, if the 
referendum has worked well in Switzerland, 



A POLITICAL PILGRIMAGE 237 

as every one concedes it has, unless you can find 
some better objection than your unwieldy bulk, 
you must admit that it would work well in your 
separate states. We tried it first in two or 
three of our cantons, where it proved so suc- 
cessful that one by one the other cantons 
adopted it, and finally, when by the unmistaka- 
ble test of experience we had proved its in- 
comparable merits, we adopted it for the na- 
tion. Try it in your states first, and have no 
fear it will win its own way in your nation." 

" Perhaps I don't entirely understand the 
workings of this referendum," said the Texan. 

" I have figured it out," said a Yankee across 
the table. " You say you are a stock-raiser. 
Suppose you were to tell your hired man to 
fence off a certain lot for the hogs, and he'd 
reply that he would do nothing of the kind. 
What would you do? " 

" I'd discharge him, sir, in one-half minute, 
sir! " said the Southerner. 

"Quite right! But, suppose a little later 
another farm-hand, on being told to plant a 
certain field in cotton, were to plant it in oats, 
what would you say to that? " 

" I'd order him off my premises, sir! " 

" But," continued the Yankee, " are not state 
representatives and congressmen the servants 
of the people? " 



2 3 8 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

" Assuredly, sir," replied the Texan, antici- 
pating the other's idea, " but in America, if our 
congressmen pass a law which we do not like, 
or neglect to pass a law we want, we turn them 
down, sir, at the polls at the very next elec- 
tion." 

" Indeed," replied the Yankee, " but to go 
back to the farmhand, would you want him 
around your place for two years, squandering 
your money, neglecting your interests, disobey- 
ing and insulting you, before turning him down 
or knocking him down as the case might be? 
I think not. And that is where the initiative 
and referendum come in. You need not wait 
till the next election to veto a measure you don't 
want or to get one that you do. It is very 
simple; you merely go over the heads of your 
servants when they cease to observe your 
wishes. Why should the people wait until an- 
other election before turning down such rascals 
as the members of the legislature of Illinois, 
and of the Chicago City Council, who in 1898 
gave to Yerkes twenty-five million dollars' 
worth of franchises in spite of the protests of 
nearly the whole commonwealth? To defeat 
such men at the polls is to lock the door after 
the horse is stolen. This fatal political pro- 
crastination is only too common in the United 
States. Take another example: Some years 



A POLITICAL PILGRIMAGE 239 

ago the United Gas Improvement Company of 
Philadelphia got control of the city council at 
a good fat figure, and was thus able to lease for 
thirty years at an exceedingly lean and low fig- 
ure the gas plant which the city had owned and 
operated for fifty-six years. This nauseating 
performance was violently but ineffectually op- 
posed by every decent American ' sovereign ' in 
the city. The referendum would have made 
such a steal impossible." 

" If that is the referendum and initiative, 
sir," said the Texan, " if it simply means being 
obeyed by our public servants, why, that is 
democracy, and you can count not only on me 
but on a 200,000 majority for it in Texas as 
soon as our people have come to understand it. 
And mind you, what we are ready to vote for 
down there we are ready to fight for." 

" Don't, pray, let us even discuss such a 
thing," puffed a fat bishop from New York, 
who had overheard the conversation. " This 
would mean nothing less than ochlocracy. 
Representative government is all right, but this 
referendum means downright mob rule. It is 
un-American, it is unconstitutional and leads 
to anarchy." 

" Pardon me," replied the Swiss suavely, 
" but has it not been said: ' By their fruits ye 
shall know them ' ? Are you agreed to that? " 



2 4 o LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

" Yes," replied the bishop stiffly. 

" Very well ; here are the facts : The refer- 
endum was opposed at first in Switzerland by 
the wealthy and the learned, the conservative 
and reactionary forces of society. Today, 
after a trial of over a quarter of a century, its 
chief opponents are the most radical Socialists, 
who find the great body of the people too con- 
servative in their movements. In fact, the 
Federal Referendum has defeated more bills 
than it has passed. The referendum upon 
federal statute laws was secured in 1874. 
From that date until 19 13 the National Con- 
gress passed 273 measures, of a general char- 
acter, upon which the referendum could have 
been demanded. It was actually demanded 
upon only 31 of these laws, of which 12 were 
adopted and 19 rejected by the people. Dur- 
ing this period, 30 amendments to the Federal 
Constitution have been submitted to the people, 
of which 14 were adopted and 16 rejected. 
Do you see anything dangerous about that? ' 

"Well, no — ah — of course, I was just — 
er — venturing an opinion. I have given the 
matter little study or thought. Perhaps there 
may be some truth in what you say," and he 
waddled off wheezing, perspiring and, who 
knows ? — perhaps thinking. 

The referendum is not altogether new to 



A POLITICAL PILGRIMAGE 241 

the people of the United States. We use it in 
every state in the Union, except Delaware, 
when adopting or altering a state constitution. 
In fifteen states the capital cannot be changed; 
in eleven no law can be passed for incurrence 
of debt not specified in the constitution; and 
in seven no laws can be passed establishing 
banking corporations without recourse to the 
referendum. Many other states make the ref- 
erendum compulsory for a multitude of differ- 
ent kinds of legislation. The custom of refer- 
ring to popular vote a proposition of a purely 
local nature, such as voting bonds to purchase a 
park, a light or water plant, to build school- 
houses, or what not, is very common in Ameri- 
can cities and is the legislative referendum pure 
and simple. 

During the past fifteen years the initiative 
and referendum have made such progress in 
American states and cities as to make of this 
movement towards effective democracy perhaps 
the most significant political fact of our time. 
By decisive majorities they have been made a 
part of the fundamental law of the land by the 
voters of South Dakota in 1898, Utah in 1900, 
Oregon in 1902, Nevada in 1905 and 191 2, 
Montana in 1906, Oklahoma in 1907, Maine 
and Missouri in 1908, Arkansas and Colorado 
in 1910, Arizona and California in 191 1, Ne- 



242 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

braska, Idaho, Washington and Ohio in 19 12, 
and Michigan in 19 13. 

But while this record shows the wide-spread 
acceptance and triumph of the principle of pop- 
ular sovereignty, it is just as well to remember 
that in the states of South Dakota, Maine, 
Montana and Washington the people are not 
allowed the right to initiate amendments to 
their state constitutions, and that various " jok- 
ers " have been embodied in the South Dakota, 
Montana and Oklahoma provisions for the in- 
itiative and referendum which have largely pre- 
vented the people of these states from making 
a successful use of these instruments of de- 
mocracy. 

Moreover, the fact must not be ignored, that 
in several states the constitutional amendments 
for direct legislation have been so drawn as 
to give the people little real control, and in 
two cases absolutely no control, over their gov- 
ernment. For example, in Utah and Idaho 
only the " general principle " of direct legisla- 
tion was incorporated into the constitution, the 
details of the system being left to legislative 
enactment. The result has been that for the 
past thirteen years the legislature of Utah has 
stubbornly refused to pass the necessary ena- 
bling act, and the people of that state have 
never been permitted the use of the initiative 



A POLITICAL PILGRIMAGE 243 

and referendum. In like manner, in Novem- 
ber, 19 1 2, the people of Idaho passed a similar 
amendment, but the legislature which met in 
January, 19 13, refused to carry out the clearly 
understood mandate of the people. 

Thus far in the year 19 13 the legislatures of 
North Dakota, Wisconsin and Texas have sub- 
mitted amendments which will be voted on by 
the people at the general election of 19 14, and 
the legislature of Iowa has passed an amend- 
ment which, if endorsed by the legislature meet- 
ing in 19 1 5, will be submitted to the people of 
that state in 19 16. But unfortunately, the 
Wisconsin constitutional amendment is the only 
one passed this year which can be regarded as 
an honest and effective effort to make practical 
use of the principle of the initiative and refer- 
endum. Such provisions as that in the Texas 
amendment, requiring a petition of 20 per cent. 
of the voters in the state to invoke either the 
initiative or the referendum, is an absurdity 
upon the face of it, and practically renders the 
law inoperative. 

However, in splendid contrast to some of 
these other states, Oregon, Colorado, Arkan- 
sas, California and Arizona have provided for 
an intelligent and effective use of the initiative 
and referendum. 

The people of Illinois and of the other 



244 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

states that are considering the adoption of the 
principle of direct legislation are beginning to 
see clearly that it is far better to have no legis- 
lation whatever upon the subject than to pass a 
law so filled with restrictions and " jokers " 
that it would be of no use whatever as an in- 
strument of democracy, but would actually 
serve to discredit the great principle of direct 
popular control of legislation. 

The movement toward real democracy has 
become so irresistible that the platforms of all 
political parties, except in the most reactionary 
states, contain planks demanding direct legisla- 
tion. 

In the future, the most pernicious enemies 
of democracy will be not the open and honest 
opponents of this principle, but the crafty and 
unscrupulous political tricksters who, with hyp- 
ocritical and sonorous phrases on their lips, 
seek to betray the principle of the initiative and 
referendum by slipping provisions into our laws 
which either render it inoperative or render 
its operation ineffectual. Let us make no mis- 
take. The real danger to popular government 
lies in the Judas kiss of its professed friends, 
with the pass-words of democracy on their lips, 
perfidious legislative " jokers " in their hands, 
the golden shekels of plutocracy in their pock- 
ets, and treason to the people in their hearts. 



A POLITICAL PILGRIMAGE 245 

The Swiss people have achieved genuine 
self-government. It is this feature of the Swiss 
Republic — the power of the people to thwart 
all legislation destructive of their best interests, 
and to enact into law any and all measures that 
will minister to their welfare — which is the 
kill and cure of corruption in politics. It is 
this popular prerogative which has made the 
statesmanship of Switzerland at once conserv- 
ative and constructive, which has in truth made 
this little mass of mountains, forests and lakes 
the " model republic of the world." 

A striking illustration of the value of the in- 
itiative and referendum came when I went to 
Interlaken. There I met a Yale student, a 
native of Connecticut who had never seen any- 
thing higher than the Berkshire hills. Very 
early in our acquaintance I discovered in him 
a constitutional prejudice against certain cate- 
gories of ideas which he termed " advanced " 
and especially against any suggestion that 
squinted in the direction of an extension of the 
sphere of government. This feeling of his 
gave rise to some very interesting discussions 
and amusing episodes. I recall one especially 
memorable conversation. He had become so 
enthusiastic over th$ Swiss mountains, lakes 
and people that he actually proposed establish- 
ing himself permanently in the country. 



246 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

" I will offer you," I said, " the same advice 
that Punch gave to a man about to be married 
— 'don't!' If you feel that you have out- 
grown New England, you are ready for the 
West. There you will meet kindred spirits, 
graduates from every state in the East." 

" What part of the country are you from? " 

" I am from the heart of the country — the 
great Mississippi valley." 

" You don't mean to say," he broke forth, 
" that you are from the region where the Pro- 
gressives, Bryan Democrats and Populists hail 
from?" 

" I am from the region which started the 
struggle for the freedom of the slave, and 
which has generally been in the van of the 
forces which have been fighting the fight of 
the people against organized greed." 

" But didn't I understand that you were a 
Harvard man and that you have been studying 
politics abroad for several years? " 

I nodded an affirmative. 

" Surely," he continued, with a gleam of hope 
in his eye, " you don't believe in those half- 
baked, a million times exploded socialistic va- 
garies of the government-ownership cranks ? " 

" For instance? " 

" Oh, government railroads and telegraphs, 
state monopoly of liquor, and all that other 



A POLITICAL PILGRIMAGE 247 

balderdash you hear from people who know 
nothing of economics or — " 

" Listen for an instant," I replied. " Did 
you know that the government-ownership 
cranks are in control in Switzerland? " 

" Go ahead," he responded, " amuse your- 
self! If you get dangerous, I'll have you taken 
to a hospital." 

" Do you see that man? " I said, pointing to 
a Herculean figure just entering the smoking- 
room. " That is Herr Z , a Swiss captain 

of industry. He is now engaged in one of the 
most remarkable engineering feats of modern 
times — building a railroad up the Jungf rau. 
I had an interesting conversation with him 
the other day. Would you like to meet 
him?" 

He assented, and we approached the Swiss 
magnate. After presenting him I said: 

" Herr Z , does Switzerland own her own 

telegraphs, telephones and railroads?" 

"Yes, sir." 

" Does the government manage an express 
company and diligence lines in connection with 
the post-office? " 

" Yes, yes! But why do you ask? " 

" And does the government have a monop- 
oly on spirits, and is it contemplating one on to- 
bacco? Does it have an Inheritance and In- 



248 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

come tax, the Initiative and Referendum and 
Proportional Representation?" 

11 Of course we have all these institutions 

and more," said Herr Z , " but why do 

you ask? Surely you knew this before? " 

" Yes, but I am sorry to say that here is a 
young man to whom all this is not only unex- 
pected but startling. Tell us, then, has experi- 
ence proved that it is best for the government 
to own and control natural monopolies? " 

" If not, we should not be continually nation- 
alizing new industries as fast as they become 
monopolies. This plan is a complete success 
— it is beneficial to rich and poor alike. The 
only ones injured are those who try to make 
illegitimate monopoly profits. It checkmates 
their game to the advantage of all legitimate 
business." 

" But does not this system develop much ras- 
cality and rottenness among government of- 
ficials?" 

" Not at all! Most decidedly no ! Corrup- 
tion in politics, wherever it exists on a large 
scale, is chiefly the result of powerful private 
monopolies influencing to their own advantage 
the affairs of state. There is but one remedy 
for this; monopoly control of government 
must give way to government ownership and 
control of monopolies. But this is not the 



A POLITICAL PILGRIMAGE 249 

whole story. This method works well because 
our officials are honest, and our officials are hon- 
est partly because there are no great private 
monopolies here attempting to influence them, 
and partly because in this country the politi- 
cians have but a limited control of the govern- 
ment. If politicians were allowed to run the 
government here, as they do in many countries, 
the advent of government ownership would 
mean merely a change from monopolistic con- 
trol of politicians to political control of mo- 
nopolies. But this vicious circle has been 
avoided because in Switzerland with the people 
themselves lies final jurisdiction." 

I thanked him while the Yale graduate de- 
parted to walk off an attack of acute mental in- 
digestion. 

At Basle a few days later my Yale friend 
proposed that we get some Cook's circular 
tickets and devote a fortnight to making a 
grand tour of Switzerland. 

" Cook's tickets," he explained, " will be not 
only cheaper than tickets bought from place to 
place, but also much less troublesome. And 
do not overlook the fact," he added, as he 
started for Cook's office, " that this is an in- 
stance of a private company improving on the 
arrangements of your government railroads." 

" Don't get any ticket for me," I shouted 



250 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

after him, for, in spite of a sneaking feeling 
that he was right, I determined not to give in 
until I had played my last card. Hastening 
down to the station I discovered not only that 
the government sold circular tickets at reduced 
rates, but that it had recently introduced a new 
form of ticket called an abonnement general, 
good for continuous travel during two weeks, 
a month, or six weeks, on all main railroad and 
steamship lines in the country. I gleefully 
bought a second-class fifteen-day abonnement 
for eleven dollars, and hastened back to the ho- 
tel, where I found my friend so pleased with 
his circular ticket for which he had paid about 
one-third more that I hadn't the heart to say 
anything about my own purchase. 

When our tickets were examined on the train 
he glanced at mine in an inquiring sort of way, 
but I merely remarked that I had got hold of 
a new combination, and would know after a few 
days' trial whether or not it was a success. At 
Lucerne, where we took a boat ride up and down 
the lake several times just for the lazy delight- 
fulness of the trip, he seemed annoyed at al- 
ways having to pay while my ticket gave me 
the right to ride whenever I liked " without 
money and without price." At Rorschack on 
Lake Constance, where we made a little side 
trip to St. Gall and Appenzell before going up 



A POLITICAL PILGRIMAGE 251 

to the Falls of the Rhine, again he appeared 
suddenly disconcerted at being obliged to pay 
the regular fare, while I, like a railroad mag- 
nate traveling on a pass, had to give the con- 
ductor only a glimpse of my magical abonne- 
ment. The climax came, however, when on 
our return to Basle we decided to go over to 
Arolla for a month's mountain climbing. The 
discovery that I still had time to make the trip 
before the expiration of my ticket, whereas his 
car-fare would amount to about five dollars 
more, made him too furious for words. 

While talking over this trip with the hotel 
porter he found that by sending our baggage 
straight through to Arolla we could go by rail 
and steamer to Frutigen, thence on foot over 
the Gemmi Pass to the Baths of Leuk, and from 
there on again by diligence, rail and our own 
feet to Arolla. 

" It will cost about ten dollars," he told me, 
" to express both trunks and our three valises 
to Arolla, but I believe the trip will be worth 
it." 

When the porter, after attending to the ship- 
ping, presented us with a bill for $2.85, the 
Yale man suggested that there must be some 
mistake. " Didn't I tell you," he demanded, 
" to send our baggage to the Hotel Mont Col- 
Ion at Arolla in the Valais? " 



2 5 2 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

" Yes," said the porter, " and so I did." 

11 But," he urged, " it takes about ten hours 
by train, six hours by diligence, and two hours 
and a half by mule to get to Arolla. Do you 
mean to tell me that the express company 
charges only $2.85 for transporting that mass 
of baggage up there ? " 

" Don't worry him," I said; "you forget 
that here we are not being robbed by an express 
company as is our custom at home, but are be- 
ing served by that wonderful institution, the 
Swiss Postal Department." 

After our descent from Arolla, on several 
occasions I invited him to go with me to in- 
vestigate the workings of the cantonal and Fed- 
eral banks. At Glaurus we went to see the 
government salt mines, and at other places in- 
spected government coal mines, cement facto- 
ries, gunpowder factories, etc. But he never 
became enthusiastic over these trips, seeming at 
once to lose all interest in an enterprise on 
learning that it was managed by the govern- 
ment. 

One day we started from Martigny to walk 
across the Tete Noir to Chamounix — meaning 
to return in two days and go on with our party 
to Zermat. But the air was so exhilarating 
and the mountains so enticing that we could not 
resist the temptation to spend two or three days 



A POLITICAL PILGRIMAGE 253 

climbing the smaller peaks in the vicinity of 
Mt. Blanc. We had left behind both our let- 
ters of credit, and when finally we were able 
to tear ourselves away and had paid our guide, 
our porter and our hotel bills, we suddenly 
discovered that we had barely enough money 
to get us to Geneva. On arriving there we 
were on the point of wiring friends at Mar- 
tigny for funds, when we saw a pawn-shop and 
my friend rushed in and pawned a diamond 
scarf-pin. 

" I suppose that is the last of my pin," he 
said as he came out, " but it was the easiest and 
quickest way to get the money." 

As we were passing through Geneva the fol- 
lowing week he stopped and redeemed his pin. 
The fee was so ridiculously small that he felt 
called upon to expostulate — though not per- 
haps so profanely as he did when bills were too 
large. The attendant looked at him pityingly 
and said: " Young man, we are here to serve 
the public, not to take advantage of its necessi- 
ties. You have paid the regular fee. I have 
nothing to do with the charge ; this is a govern- 
ment institution." 

He sneaked out and said nothing, but I could 
see that he was " hard hit." 

A month or so later, finding ourselves in Zu- 
rich, we went to see one of the famous " Relief 



254 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

Stations " where men who are tramping from 
town to town looking for work find clean quar- 
ters, a wholesome moral atmosphere and nour- 
ishing food — all at no cost. There are thirty- 
six such stations in the canton of Zurich alone, 
all supported at the public expense. 

The place seemed quite as comfortable as 
our Salvation Army lodging-houses, and its in- 
mates apparently were an honest, self-respect- 
ing lot who regarded the station not as a 
charitable institution but as a very proper con- 
venience provided by a wise government for the 
unemployed members of its industrial army. 
Some of them were young fellows taking ad- 
vantage of this opportunity to see the world, to 
learn new tricks in their trades and to prospect 
for better paying jobs; others were men in the 
prime of life, genuine " out-of-works " anx- 
iously looking for regular employment; while 
still others belonged to the class of grizzled 
veterans of industry who, being a little the 
worse for wear, invariably are the first to be 
laid on the shelf in times of economic depres- 
sion. 

I asked one of them if he had ever been in a 
labor colony. " No," he said, flushing slightly, 
" it may some time come to that, but when I 
get too old to keep my place in the ranks I hope 
with the aid of my children to be able to get a 



A POLITICAL PILGRIMAGE 255 

little truck farm. Labor colonies are places 
where those of us who have failed but who are 
not yet quite ready for the scrap-heap or the 
bone-pile are enabled to contribute somewhat 
to our own support. They are a mild form of 
charity, but their inmates none the less are pau- 
pers." 

There is a free employment bureau in each 
station, and the management is authorized to 
supply clothes and shoes to those in dire need. 
In some cases it gives to men who are com- 
pletely " broke " fifty or seventy-five cents for 
use in case of emergency. When any of them 
are ill they are sent at once to the splendid pub- 
lic hospitals. 

" Doesn't this sort of thing have a tendency 
to encourage idleness and thriftlessness? " I 
asked of the superintendent. 

" Not at all," he replied; " in fact, quite the 
contrary. We are most careful to discriminate 
between the worker and the bum. The whole 
mission of these stations is, by putting the men 
in the way of taking care of themselves, to keep 
the temporarily idle worker from degenerating 
into a bum. Every lodger is required to show 
his ' traveling warrant,' a sort of industrial 
passport which is stamped and dated at each 
station, thus preserving a complete record of 
each man's movements. Anyone who has had 



256 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

no work for three months or who refuses to 
work or who has no ' traveling warrant ' is rele- 
gated immediately to the work-house. More- 
over, as a rule, no one is allowed to stop at the 
same station more than once in six months." 

At Geneva we called on M. Jean Sigg — the 
Geneva representative of the Federal Working- 
men's Secretary, an official who is paid by the 
government and elected by the labor unions. 
This secretary has done much good work in a 
variety of ways, such as collecting statistics, ad- 
vising the unions as well as their individual 
members and helping to settle labor troubles by 
arbitration. We discussed with M. Sigg the 
interesting experiments which have been car- 
ried on in several cantons with insurance 
against lack of employment. He said the re- 
sults had not yet been decisive for or against 
the system. 

u In addition to all these palliative meas- 
ures," he continued, " Switzerland by con- 
stantly increasing its facilities for technical 
education has been increasing the industrial 
efficiency of its workers and decreasing their 
liability to loss of employment; but we feel that 
if there is any one lesson which our varied ex- 
perience teaches, it is this: that only by solv- 
ing the greater problems of the organization of 



A POLITICAL PILGRIMAGE 257 

industry and the distribution of wealth can the 
question of the unemployed be effectually dis- 
posed of. This question is but an outward 
symptom of a deep-seated social disease: the 
exploitation of one man by another, or in its 
aggravated form, the exploitation of all men 
by huge soulless corporate monsters. When 
once we have healed ourselves of this dread 
disease, quickly the army of the unemployed, 
with all its camp followers of vice and crime, 
will fold its tents and silently steal away, and 
its departure this time will be final." 

During the latter part of the season the Yale 
man never seemed to tire of questioning all 
sorts and conditions of men about the practical 
workings of Swiss institutions. On one occa- 
sion he unearthed a perfect mine of information 
by cross-examining a Swiss fellow-traveler while 
going from Geneva to Berne. " Tell me," he 
demanded, " your telephone and telegraph 
service is cheap, and your express charges, dili- 
gence, steamer and railroad fares are low. 
But we are told by many college professors and 
most newspapers and magazines in America, 
that were our government to enter business, 
not being as economical and sagacious as a pri- 
vate company, it must do one of two things: 
give inferior service at high rates, or run at a 



258 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

loss and make up the deficit in taxes. Your 
government service is excellent; your rates are 
low; do you have a yearly deficit? " 

" True ; our rates are low and our service 
good," answered the Swiss; "and once in a 
great while some branch of the government 
service has a deficit. This is advertised abroad 
with the greatest publicity by private companies 
to discourage government enterprises else- 
where. But on the average our government 
enterprises make a handsome profit and lessen 
our taxes enormously." 

" Well and good," interrupted the Yale man 
doggedly, " with some of your government 
concerns, but you will hardly pretend, I think, 
to be proud of the fact that your government 
helps pay your taxes from the profits of an al- 
cohol monopoly — it is the devil's own busi- 
ness." 

" But our government does nothing of the 
kind," said the other; "the profits from the 
sale of alcohol do not replace taxes, but are 
divided among the cantons and are added to 
the existing educational funds, and a goodly 
percentage each year is devoted to fighting in- 
temperance or to charities made necessary by 
intemperance. The result has been that since 
the advent of the government monopoly, De- 
cember 23, 1886, the consumption of alcohol 



A POLITICAL PILGRIMAGE 259 

has fallen off forty per cent. The object of 
this government monopoly is, indeed, not reve- 
nue, for Switzerland stands unique among the 
nations of the world in this, that, far from go- 
ing deeper in debt every year, she had property, 
on January 1, 19 13, called the Federal Fortune, 
amounting to 241,144,619 francs or $48,228,- 
924. Her national debt 1 is only 125,069,774 
francs or $25,013,955, leaving a federal for- 
tune, free and clear, of 116,074,845 francs, or 
$23,214,969. In addition to this, the separate 
cantons, communes and municipalities have 
fortunes amounting up into the millions." 

All this, I thought, in a country which, as 
someone has said, " is the poorest in Europe 
from the standpoint of natural advantages." 

Some of the Swiss towns are so rich that they 
levy no taxes, and at Buchs in St. Gall, in addi- 
tion to this exemption, every citizen receives 
gratis more than an acre of land which he may 
cultivate, firewood for the winter, and grazing 
ground for several cattle. The town of So- 
leme in Schaffhausen has forests, pastures and 
cultivated lands worth about 6,000,000 francs. 
The canton of Obwald with 15,000 inhabitants 

1 This does not include the railroad debt, which is being 
liquidated automatically every year from the net profits of 
the roads, and which is more than counterbalanced by the 
value of the railroads themselves. 



260 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

has lands and forests valued at 11,350,000 
francs. These instances could be multiplied 
almost indefinitely, for nearly every commune 
and canton has public lands. The important 
fact, however, is not that the Swiss govern- 
ments, national, state and municipal, are 
wealthy, but that the private wealth of the 
country is so diffused among the people that, 
roughly speaking, two-thirds of the heads of 
families are agricultural landholders. 

That evening as we were having a quiet 
smoke, the Yale man reopened the discussion. 
" I have been carrying on some investigations 
of my own," he said, " and I have discovered 
that, in spite of all the admirable features con- 
nected with the Swiss form of government, 
there is one very undesirable feature which the 
Swiss, like the rest of us, seem unable to get 
rid of." 

" And what is that?" 

" Bosses," he replied pensively rather than 
triumphantly, for insensibly of late he had been 
assuming a more sympathetic attitude toward 
Swiss political institutions. " From what I can 
learn, every city and canton has its political 
boss who dominates his party, and through it 
dominates the municipality or canton, just as 
our bosses rule our cities and states at home. 



A POLITICAL PILGRIMAGE 261 

Human nature is human nature after all — no 
matter what political methods are employed. 
Men love to be led, and so far as I can see, the 
rank and file of the voters are led around by the 
nose here just as they are in every other so- 
called ' self-governing ' country in the world." 

" I would not for a moment attempt to deny 
that there is a good deal of truth in what you 
say," I responded, " but I think perhaps you 
have overlooked an important distinction. 
With one or two exceptions Swiss political 
leaders, or ' bosses ' as you call them, have 
gained their ascendency, as have Wilson, Bryan, 
Roosevelt and La Follette, principally by the 
ability and desire they have shown to serve the 
people, and only secondarily by their efficiency 
in building up strong political organizations. 
Nearly all the political leaders of all political 
parties in Switzerland are of this type. So far 
as I have been able to discover, the Croker, 
Piatt type, which robs or betrays the people in 
order to enrich itself and its friends, is not to 
be found anywhere in Switzerland except in the 
canton of Fribourg, the only canton which has 
no Initiative and Referendum. This differ- 
ence you will see is absolutely fundamental. 

" But let me make myself plain on another 
point," I continued. " I do not harbor the de- 



262 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

lusion that Switzerland is a paradise. It is 
true that the Swiss have less grinding poverty 
and less vice per capita than any other country 
in the world, with the possible exception of 
New Zealand, yet one finds numbers of poor 
people, lazy people and dishonest people, as 
well as much drunkenness, even in Switzerland. 
While it is evident the Swiss have disposed of 
many problems which at present are perplexing 
the rest of the world, it is equally evident that 
they have many serious problems still confront- 
ing them. Will they be able to solve these 
problems? I do not know. Will they con- 
tinue to progress in the future as they have in 
the past? I hope so, but even more do I hope 
that the United States and the rest of the world 
will be able to put to practical use the splendid 
discoveries which the Swiss already have made 
in the realm of state-craft." 

" Curious, isn't it? " mused my compatriot 
between puffs at his pipe. " The Swiss are the 
only people in the world with a larger capital 
than their indebtedness — and yet," he ex- 
claimed, suddenly rising and speaking with 
great earnestness, " what does that amount to? 
Their greatest capital is in the civic sagacity, 
civic energy and civic purity of their citizens. 
Most of their voters have made politics their 
business, and statesmanlike politics has made 



A POLITICAL PILGRIMAGE 263 

of every legitimate business a success. I am 
very much tempted when I get home to go in 
for politics myself." 

" Switzerland has perhaps more numerous 
government activities," he continued, " and yet 
less ' paternalism,' than any country in the 
world. I could not understand this for a long 
time, but that was because I had not yet 
achieved the national point of view. Accord- 
ing to that view, the people by means of the 
Initiative and Referendum are the government, 
and consequently whatever it does for them is 
self-help and not ' paternalism.' Switzerland 
has worked out, not only a successful political 
democracy, but also to a certain extent a suc- 
cessful industrial democracy. It has only one 
or two lonesome little corporation-owned 
' bosses,' and no Napoleons of finance, no oil 
kings, no robber coal barons." 

I was so astonished I could only grasp his 
hand. 

" If the American people," he continued, 
" could see what I have seen this summer — 
progressive democracy in practice — they could 
not fail to realize that our present era of cor- 
poration regulation is of interest chiefly as the 
precursor of a more fundamental and rational 
regime of gradually and conservatively worked 
out social reconstruction." 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE STRANGE CASE OF ROBERT 

LOUIS STEVENSON AND 

JULES SIMONEAU 

During a winter on the Pacific coast we found 
a delightful bit of Europe transplanted to 
American soil. At Monterey two essentially 
old-world characters had lived, and one was 
still living, in a setting of vineyards, orchards, 
and blue sky, reminiscent of the Midi of 
France, Italy, or Spain. From the personality 
of Jules Simoneau and the traces and traditions 
of Robert Louis Stevenson still to be found 
there and at San Francisco, we carried away as 
vivid and as delightful impressions as any we 
had gained on foreign shores. 

All roads in California lead the tourist to the 
quaint town of Monterey, the " old Pacific cap- 
ital," with its picturesque missions, its early 
Spanish theatre, its many monuments of a by- 
gone age and a vanished people. For the life 
of Monterey is all in retrospect; its shops deal 

in antiquities, its cypresses are centuries old, 

264 






STEVENSON AND SIMONEAU 265 

and the chimes that ring out from the mission 
tower are voices of the past, faint echoes of 
that far-off time when they called the Indians 
to San Carlos Mission to hear the glad tidings 
Father Junipero Serra had come across the seas 
to tell. 

But among all the relics of the past, to me 
the most interesting was Jules Simoneau, 
friend of Stevenson, who in the early days wel- 
comed that " Prince of Vagabonds " to his lit- 
tle Bohemian restaurant and to his big French 
heart with such generous hospitality and such 
genuine love that Mrs. Stevenson, writing to 
him afterward from Scotland when Stevenson 
was too ill to write himself, said: " His heart 
yearns to be in some sort of communication 
with ' his dear Simoneau/ as he always calls 
you, even though it is at second hand and 
through my pen. Your friendship and kind- 
ness to Mr. Stevenson are among the few 
things he can remember with unalloyed pleas- 
ure connected with his stay in California. He 
cannot speak of it now without tears in his 
eyes." 

In a New York periodical, 1 a writer, men- 
tioning Simoneau in connection with Stevenson, 
evidently unaware of the intimacy of which I 
am about to give proofs, says: "Something 

1 The Book Buyer, May, 1899. 



266 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

very like a friendship ripened between them." 
As to Stevenson's own estimate of the relation- 
ship we have only to turn to the letters he 
wrote Simoneau. Through these he, being 
dead, may yet speak of his love and gratitude. 
Some one has said: " A man is better read by 
the letters he receives than those he writes." 
After seeing Simoneau I felt it was indeed a 
privilege to be able to read this delightful char- 
acter through the medium of Stevenson's let- 
ters; but truly they cast their light both ways 
and reveal as much the tender heart of the mas- 
ter as the goodness of the old man. 

Aside from the evidence they give of Ste- 
venson's happy faculty for making friends 
and even lovers among all classes, these letters 
are rarely interesting in that they mark the 
transition from poverty to ease, from the pe- 
riod of unrecognized struggle to that of dawn- 
ing fame. They come to us fresh and buoyant 
out of the heart of that happy time at Hyeres 
in the South of France, of which he wrote from 
his island exile to Sidney Colvin: " Me- 
thought you asked me — frankly — was I 
happy. ' Happy? (said I) I was only happy 
once; that was at Hyeres.' " The picture of 
that happiness which he draws for the old man 
has only one blot to mar its beauty. " Now I 
am in clover," he writes, " only my health a 



STEVENSON AND SIMONEAU 267 

mere ruined temple; the ivy grows along its 
shattered front. Otherwise I have no wish 
that is not fulfilled; — a beautiful small house 
in a beautiful large garden, a fine view of plain, 
sea and mountains, a wife that suits me down to 
the ground and a barrel of good Beaujolais. 
To this I must add that my books grow steadily, 
more popular; and if I could only avoid illness, 
I should be well to do for money ; as it is I keep 
pretty near the wind." 

Most of the letters are in French, greetings 
for the exile from his own land in his own 
tongue. It is interesting to note Stevenson's 
perfect command of French and his peculiar lit- 
erary charm, which even in this foreign language 
at times is manifest. There are no dates, a 
characteristic of Stevenson's correspondence, 
but one letter explains a longer silence than 
usual by saying he had lain for weeks between 
life and death; 2 but that now his strength was 
returning, and — " It is with a real joy that I 
find myself able to assure you that I shall never 
forget you, that our good friendship and all 
our happy times together are and shall be for- 
ever cherished in my memory. No," he adds, 
" I would be a poor creature if I should forget 
what I owe to Papa Simoneau." And again 
he protests: " Do not think that I have for- 

2 His illness of May, 1884. 



268 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

gotten you or that I ever shall forget you. 
Nothing of the kind. I hold your good mem- 
ory very close and I will guard it till death." 

And this again from the sick chamber to re- 
assure the old man : 

" Write me then very soon, dear Simoneau, and as 
for me I promise you that you will hear talk of me 
very soon. I will write you again shortly and send 
you one of my books. This is only a grip of the 
hand. Your friend, 

" Robert Louis Stevenson." 

And this, in a letter written in English: 

" It would be difficult to tell you how glad I was 
to get your letter with your good news and kind re- 
membrance. It did my heart good to the bottom. I 
shall never forget the good times we had together, the 
many long talks, the games of chess, the flute on occa- 
sion, and the excellent food." 

Then in another French letter as to his writ- 
ing, which begins to be recognized: 

11 1 work hard. I begin not to be the last, and that 
which spoils nothing, they begin to pay me a trifle more 
for my little foolishnesses. Already they contend 
among themselves for what I write, and I cannot com- 
plain of what they call the fees." 

And this apropos of an incident of over- 
bearingness that has aroused his disgust: 



STEVENSON AND SIMONEAU 269 

" But the race of man was born tyrannical ; doubt- 
less Adam beat Eve, and when all the rest are dead, 
the last man will be found beating the last dog ! " 

Here is a characteristic observation which 
the Englishman in France writes the French- 
man in America : 

" All races are better away from their own country, 
but I think you French improve the most of all. At 
home I like you well enough, but give me the French- 
man abroad; had you stayed at home you would prob- 
ably have acted otherwise. Consult your conscious- 
ness and you will think as I do. How about a law 
condemning the people of any country to be educated 
in another, change sons, in short! Should we not gain 
all round? Would not the Englishman unlearn 
hypocrisy? Would not the Frenchman learn to put 
some heart into his friendship? I name what strikes 
me as the two most obvious defects of the two nations. 
The French may also learn to be less capricious to 
women and the English to be a little more honest. 
Indeed their merits and defects make a balance: 
The English The French 

Hypocrites Free from hypocrisy 

Good, stout, reliable Incapable of friendship 

friends 
Dishonest to the root Fairly honest 

Fairly decent to women Rather indecent to women 

" Here is my table, not at all the usual one, but 
yet I think you will agree with it, and by travel each 
race can cure much of its defects and acquire much of 



2 7 o LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

the other's virtues in turn. Let us say that you and 
I are complete! You are, anyway. I would not 
change a hair of you. The Americans hold the Eng- 
lish faults, dishonesty and hypocrisy, perhaps not as 
strongly, but still to the exclusion of others. It is 
strange that such defects should be so hard to eradicate 
after a century of separation." 

Our party had heard only by chance as we 
were leaving Monterey that Simoneau was still 
living there, still glad " to discuss the problems 
of the universe " with others as he had with 
Stevenson. The problems of the universe did 
not interest us so much just then as the reminis- 
cences of which we heard he was full, and 
though we had only two hours before our train 
left, we hurried down to his little cottage, hop- 
ing to have some talk with him. We went 
simply to see the man who had succored Robert 
Louis Stevenson. We came away as impressed 
with the personality of Simoneau as Stevenson 
had been and fully convinced that anyone who 
knew him well enough would realize that Ste- 
venson's friendship for him was based on some- 
thing other than a mere sense of gratitude ; that 
between the litterateur and the peasant, in spite 
of the gulf that separated them socially and in- 
tellectually, there existed a real affinity of soul. 

We were met at the door by Simoneau's old 
Spanish wife, who, at sight of our party of six, 



STEVENSON AND SIMONEAU 271 

assumed a most forbidding aspect. Evidently 
she had suffered many things at the hands of 
tourists who had " done " her house and her 
husband with scant regard for consequences to 
either. 

In answer to our question if we could see M. 
Simoneau before our train left, she replied in a 
burst of broken English: "He eat now; he 
work hard all day; he only eat two meal a day; 
he so old, so tired, so bad stomach, if he hurry 
to eat, or be stopped to talk, his stomach he act 
bad," from which we gathered that Stevenson's 
jovial friend of the early days had developed 
into a dangerous dyspeptic whom it behooved 
us to leave in peace. 

We tried to pacify the old lady in every way 
except the one way she plainly indicated by the 
door still closed in our faces. In spite of her 
refusal, we were quick to gain an entrance, 
willy-nilly, on the plea of our desire to try her 
famous tamales, and I placed a half-dollar in 
her hand, making an apprehensive mental cal- 
culation as to how many bunches of tamales 
each of us would have to eat. She weakened 
a trifle and asked us to be seated while she got 
the tamales. This was a step gained, and we 
intrenched ourselves, glad to be at least under 
the same roof that had sheltered Stevenson. 

When the door opened we looked up eagerly, 



272 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

but, alas! it was only the tamales done up in a 
newspaper, tied and evidently prepared for 
outside consumption. From the little kitchen 
we heard the clatter of dishes and caught 
through a crack in the door a glimpse of the 
old man at his supper. It seemed all the view 
or interview we were to have. Our mingled 
zeal and disappointment fought with our pride, 
and we lingered while the old lady continued 
to explain how fatal it was to interrupt him. 
We acquiesced in all she said, agreed it was 
brutal to hurry him, and then asked irrelevantly 
if she supposed he was nearly through. I real- 
ize now we overstepped all limits. She must 
have realized it then, but when she saw how 
matters stood — rather how firmly we sat — 
she accepted the inevitable gracefully and con- 
cealed her impatience, seeming only distracted 
between two conflicting duties, her plain duty 
to her husband and what seemed, to her Span- 
ish idea of etiquette, her no less plain duty to 
these guests who had thrust themselves upon 
her. 

At last she went into the kitchen and whis- 
pered something to Simoneau. In a few mo- 
ments he appeared with his napkin tucked in his 
blouse plainly intending to shake hands with 
us and let us go. We explained our persistence 
by saying we had loved Stevenson and all his 



STEVENSON AND SIMONEAU 273 

works and wanted to thank him for what he 
had done to make those works possible. 

He saw we were real lovers of his hero, and 
instantly his manner changed. His face was 
transfigured; there were tears at his eyes as he 
said, in a ringing voice that belied his eighty- 
five years and left us no doubt of our welcome : 
" Whoever comes to me in the name of that 
friend is indeed bienvenu." 

Tossing his napkin into the kitchen, he came 
forward with the heartiest manner, motioning 
us to chairs, rubbing his hands in the genial 
French way, throwing out his chest, suddenly 
all alert, all eagerness to speak of his friend. 

He got down his books, an entire set Steven- 
son had sent him, each volume bearing on the 
fly-leaf a typical inscription and his autograph, 
Simoneau's own name often linked with the au- 
thor's as in this : " Ce qu'il y en a de mes ouv- 
rages! Je ne trouve plus rien a griff oner. 
N'oubliez pas Robert Louis Stevenson. 77 
n } oubllera pas Jules Simoneau." 3 In the 
" Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde " 
we found this : " But the case of Robert Louis 

3 " Here are all my works ! I find nothing more to 
scribble. 

" Do not forget 
Robert Louis Stevenson. 
He will not forget Jules Simoneau." 



274 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

Stevenson and Jules Simoneau — if the one 
forget the other — would be stranger still [ 
Robert Louis Stevenson." In another we read, 
"Vive Jules Simoneau et le temps jadis! )>A 
In another, " Que nous avons passe de bonnes 
soirees, mon brave Simoneau. Sois tranquille, 
je ne les oublierai pas." 5 In still another : 
" If there ever was a man who was a good man 
to me, it was Jules Simoneau." 

He showed us different photographs he had 
of his friend, pointed out the Stevenson mot- 
toes on the wall, and read in a voice like a 
trumpet, with a strong French accent: 

" Ze world is so full of a number of zings, 
I am sure we should all be as happy as kings ! " 

adding in a reminiscent tone : " That was 
Stevenson — always as happy as a king." 

When I asked him if Stevenson had sent a 
letter with the books, " No; que voulez-vous? " 
he said with a laugh, pointing to the crowded 
shelf. " Was that not enough to read in one 
day? " But this opened up the subject of the 
letters, and he took them reverently out of a 
little iron box. As I read them aloud, the old 
man fell into a reverie. He knew every sylla- 

4 "Long live Jules Simoneau and the good old days! " 

5 " What good evenings we have passed together, my brave 
Simoneau. Rest assured; I will not forget them." 



STEVENSON AND SIMONEAU 275 

ble by heart; if I hesitated he was quick to give 
me the word; but it was not my voice he heard 
— a voice that for us was still was sounding in 
his ears ; a hand we could not see was beckoning 
him. 

In answer to our question as to how he found 
Stevenson, he said: " Why he found me. He 
came to me at once. All Bohemia came to 
me." Then he told us how one morning with 
the little company of regulars and irregulars 
there had appeared at his restaurant a pale 
young man, sick in body, sick at heart, with no 
friends, no name, no prospects, whose only 
recommendation was his need. Many such he 
welcomed in those days, glad for the breath of 
the outside world they brought with them, lit- 
tle heedful of the bills they often left unpaid. 
Not forgetful to entertain strangers, more than 
once he had been rewarded with the " angel 
unawares." 

In Stevenson's case, however, I think he was 
never entirely unaware, since when we asked 
him his first impression of Stevenson he an- 
swered with a smile that seemed to light up all 
the years that were gone: " It was just love 
at first sight ; that was all ! " 6 

6 Stevenson's full appreciation of Simoneau was more tardy, 
as his first references to him are slight. He was in Monterey 
from the latter part of September, 1879, to the end of the 



276 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

When we spoke of the debt of gratitude the 
world owed him for having come to Steven- 
son's rescue, he said quite simply: " It was 
only what I should have wanted done for me; 
he was worth saving." And I thought, as I 
glanced from the works on the shelf to the face 
of this old man: "What a golden harvest 
literature has reaped from this application of 
the Golden Rule; what a wealth of experiences 
were his that are sunset memories now! " 

One secular letter, so to speak, he kept with 
the sacred ones — a letter from the secretary 
of the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship So- 
ciety of San Francisco, announcing his own and 
Mrs. Stevenson's election to honorary member- 
ship and warmly inviting him to be the guest 
of the society at its next meeting. Among all 
the brilliant men and women who make up its 
membership none is more honored than Simo- 
neau, and he spoke with naive enthusiasm of 
his reception when he read them his letters: 
" It was a royal welcome, madame; I was like 
a demigod." 

He inquired eagerly if we would be in San 
Francisco the thirteenth of November, the date 

year, as appears in the volume of letters edited by Sidney 
Colvin (Scribner's, 1901, p. 164), where only occasional 
superficial impressions of Simoneau during the first few 
weeks of his stay are recorded. 



STEVENSON AND SIMONEAU 277 

of the next meeting, which, though it will add 
almost another to his eighty-five years, will still, 
according to his count, make him feel at least 
twenty years younger, since, as he assured us 
when we apologized for the length of our visit, 
' Every good talk I have of Stevenson makes 
me ten years younger." His wife, by this time 
beaming on us as benefactors, added in her ex- 
pressive way: " When he have the bad feel- 
ings and be sorry, I run quick to get some one 
to talk to him of Missa Stevenson, and that 
make him well again." 

Emboldened by this new view of the case 
and loath to leave the feast while so much re- 
mained untasted, I suddenly made up my mind 
to defer my departure from Monterey, and 
when the others said " Good-by," I said " Au 
revoir." This hour with Simoneau had some- 
how dulled my appetite for the stock sights on 
our program. What did I care for Lick Ob- 
servatory when I might look through this old 
man's eyes at a life that had shone like a star? 
The next morning I arrived at his cottage 
with camera and notebook, and asked that I 
might take his picture, get a few points for a 
sketch about him and Stevenson, and perhaps 
(here my heart thumped) sandwich in a phrase 
or two from the letters to show how matters 
stood. To my immense relief he agreed to 



278 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

everything and explained, with a logic in which 
I was quick to acquiesce, " the vast deefairance 
between publishing the letters as a whole, that 
which he would nevair consent to," and pub- 
lishing extracts from those letters in an article 
about himself. He had made a gift of one or 
two letters to a Stevenson Society in Philadel- 
phia, but no gold could buy his treasures; his 
eyes flashed fire as he told me his one answer 
to all would-be purchasers, to persistent pub- 
lishers and callous collectors, who had tried to 
tempt him with big sums of money — " Ze 
money is not coined which could buy zeese 
zings from me." 

I could see that all hands were needed in the 
preparation of the chili and the tamales; but 
when I rose to go, saying I must not keep him 
longer from his work, his wife came to the res- 
cue of my accusing conscience, assuring me she 
would do all the work herself " so that," as she 
explained with tactful turning of the tables, 
" he might have the pleasure to speak of Missa 
Stevenson." A delicate way this of setting me 
at my ease by giving me to understand that, in- 
stead of being under obligations, they were the 
favoured ones. I have rarely met with a finer 
courtesy than in this little cabin by the sea, with 
my French host and my Spanish hostess rolling 
up tamales in the kitchen. 



STEVENSON AND SIMONEAU 279 

But Simoneau did enjoy the talk and grow 
young again. His eyes sparkled as he told of 
the rare old times. Think of what had been 
his — the companionsihp of Stevenson for 
three months ; the certainty that he would come 
every morning as surely as the sun (though a 
little later, for he breakfasted at ten) , and 
every evening for his supper, the " occasional 
music of the flute, and the long talks," as regu- 
larly as the sun set! He told me he had few 
friends now, but I did not pity him overmuch; 
in the old days he had feasted indeed, and 
memories sufficed now for friendship's daily 
food. 

Laughing to scorn the suggestion that I 
might betray his confidence, he left me alone 
for a few minutes to copy the extracts while 
he helped his wife pack the tamales. I submit- 
ted to him the extracts I had taken, and when I 
recall his hearty response to each one of my 
tentative proposals : " Mais, out, madame, 
take what you will. Have I not explained the 
deefairance? " — my one haunting regret in the 
whole affair is that I did not copy more. Only 
once did he take exception to my choice. As 
I read one of the extracts that was particularly 
tender and intimate he shook his head saying, 
" No, that is too intime; that was just for me." 
Admiring the fine instinct which recognized the 



2 8o LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

dividing line between conversation and com- 
munion, I envied him his lot that Stevenson had 
spoken thus to him. 

One volume of his set I noticed was missing 

— probably the theft of some trusted visitor 

— and as I was about to ask him for his ad- 
dress, that I might replace it, my eye fell on a 
faded envelope with a Hyeres postmark, 
whereon was written with a firm clear hand: 
" M. Jules Simoneau, Monterey, Monterey 
County, California, U. S. A." It was as if the 
master himself had answered my question to 
whom I should send his book. 

At last the tamales were ready and the hour 
had come for Simoneau to start on his daily 
rounds. Just one more request I had to make : 
" Might I take the ' Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ' 
down town and have the inscription properly 
photographed? " I would bring it back safely 
within an hour, I added, as he hesitated. It 
was perhaps too great a strain on his new con- 
fidence to trust me with that book, but he re- 
plied with prudent chivalry that he would go 
with me so that I might escape the long walk 
back. When I protested that he would miss 
some of the morning sales, he said: "Ze 
plaisair that I have to walk with you, madame, 
is greater far zan ze plaisir the money from ze 
tamales could bring; " and strapping a basket 



STEVENSON AND SIMONEAU 281 

over each shoulder and tucking the book safely 
in his blouse, he started off with me. 

After the photograph was taken, I told him 
I was going to the Junipero Serra Monument. 
" You know," I explained laughingly, " I have 
seen no sights in Monterey but you " ; and he 
responded gaily: " Shall I tell you what is a 
definition of Monterey? It is one very old 
town, where lives one very old philosopher who 
is named Jules Simoneau." And then, as if to 
prove how good a joke that was, he would not 
desert me till he had shown me some of the* 
sights I had neglected. 

As he trudged to the old fort with me, he 
pointed out, in the distance, Pacific Grove, 
where he goes on his rounds distributing ta- 
males. One hundred and thirty-one bunches 
he had in all that day, and " always it is that I 
cannot make as many as I can sell. I have not 
to ask people to buy; they wait for me. On 
the street? No, I leave that to the little lads; 
my clientele is in the country — poor families 
who buy a dozen or half a dozen bunches. 
Five cents a bunch I sell them. You see, 
madame, it is this way; the rich who could pay 
ten cents do not eat tamales. No, I do not 
make much money; but I do not need much 
money, so there it balances. Tired? Yes, 
sometimes, for I am getting old; but que voulez- 



282 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

vous? " with a shrug of his shoulders and a 
laugh as he tightened the straps and adjusted 
the baskets: "It is to do; I do it — voila 
tout." 

So this old philosopher of Monterey shoul- 
dered his heavy burden and started gaily out 
for his day's work as that other philosopher at 
Monterey so many years ago shouldered his 
heavier burden and started off for his day's 
work — a day that was, alas, so short for the 
work he had to do ! 

Before my car came I had just time to see the 
monument to the old Spanish priest, Father 
Junipero Serra, who landed here in 1770 and 
founded all the missions along the coast. As 
Simoneau climbed the steep hill that overlooks 
the sea, never losing his breath or seeming to 
be weary, I said, " Not many eighty-five-year- 
olds are as active as you." 

"Shall I tell you ze zecrete?" he replied. 
" I nevair fret. If good luck comes, I enjoy; 
if bad luck, I get out of it as soon as posseeble 
and I nevair get sick with desir for what I can- 
not have. Enfin, I am content," and — throw- 
ing out his chest proudly — "Stevenson was 
like me." 

I thought as I looked at the old man and re- 
membered the young one : " Yes, Stevenson 
was like you. He truly made always the most 



STEVENSON AND SIMONEAU 283 

of the best, the least of the worst; he, if any, 
practised the courage that he preached, and by 
his example led countless souls to resolve with 
him to ' play the man.' " 

Seeing my car in the distance, I ran down 
the hill to catch it, while Simoneau waved with 
his sombrero a hearty farewell. A splendid 
picture he made, in his rough peasant's blouse, 
with his sun-browned face and erect figure, the 
old philosopher of Monterey standing by the 
monument to the old priest of the mission. 



CHAPTER XVII 
STEVENSON IN SAN FRANCISCO 

Several years ago in San Francisco, as I read 
Robert Louis Stevenson's comment on " the 
evocation of that roaring city in a few years 
of a man's life from the marshes and the blow- 
ing sand," I was impressed by the characteristic 
difference between his old world point of view 
and our own, we taking as a matter of course 
this phenomenal growth of our cities which he 
could liken only to " some enchantment of the 
Arabian Nights." 

" Such swiftness of increase," he continues, 
still speaking of San Francisco, " as with an 
overgrown youth, suggests a corresponding 
swiftness of destruction. We are in early geo- 
logical epochs, changeful and insecure, and we 
feel as with a sculptor's model that the author 
may yet grow weary of and shatter the rough 
sketch." 

The recent destruction of San Francisco 
lends to these words a tragic significance and 
recalls vividly to my mind a morning spent 

searching out Stevenson's haunts in the old mis- 

284 



STEVENSON IN SAN FRANCISCO 285 

sion quarter of that city. There, after the last 
act of the play was over, the lights out and the 
actor long since gone, I saw the stage — even 
that vanished now ! — where he played out the 
grimmest act of his life's tragedy. As I stood 
before the dreary workingman's lodging-house, 
there came to me a vision of the " sick man " 
who lived there " all alone on forty-five cents 
a day and sometimes less, with quantities of 
hard work and many heavy thoughts, burying 
so much courage and suffering in the manu- 
script " we read today with such delight; trying 
so bravely to " fight it through," with " no one 
but his landlady and restaurant waiters to speak 
to for days at a time " ; in that glad Christmas 
season, the face of Death almost the only 
friendly face at hand, and seeming not unkindly 
as he lifts his own to meet it. For " Death is 
no bad friend," he writes; " like the truant 
child I am beginning to grow weary and timid 
in this big jostling city and would run to my 
nurse, even although she should have to whip 
me before putting me to bed." 

Walking over to his restaurant on Bush 
street, the chill wind from the bay beating in 
my face, I could almost hear him say, " I'm 
the miser in earnest now, and Saturday when I 
felt so ill it seemed strange not to be able to 
afford a drink. I would have walked half a 



286 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

mile — tired as I felt — for a brandy and 
soda." 

I had my lunch on a bare table in the little 
cafe where everything was marked five cents, 
from the pea soup to the cup custard. But 
while I could follow up this frugal repast by a 
dinner at Marchand's at night, Stevenson had 
nothing better to look forward to after that 
" drop from a fifty cent to a twenty-five cent 
dinner " which he records in a letter, adding 
quickly, " but I regret nothing and do not even 
dislike these straits, though the flesh will rebel 
on occasion." 

The elderly man who waited on me had, I 
thought, a slight Dutch accent and with a 
woman's intuition, I instantly recognized in him 
that " waiter of High Dutch extraction only 
partially extracted " in Stevenson's day, by this 
time thoroughly extracted and Americanized 
and proud proprietor of the little restaurant. 

" What could be more romantic! " I mused. 
In my enthusiasm it seemed to me at that mo- 
ment entirely worth his while to have been in- 
carcerated in this cubby-hole for a score of 
years, waiting for me to arrive on the scene to 
discover and identify him! 

I could hardly wait until the man came out 
of the kitchen with my pork pie, to ask him all 
about " the slender gentleman in the ulster, with 



STEVENSON IN SAN FRANCISCO 287 

the volume buttoned into the breast of it," 
whom he had served so often with coffee and 
rolls. 

" Stevenson," I explained, as he stared at me 
blankly; " Robert Louis, you know; tell me all 
you can remember of him." Alas for my con- 
jectures and theories ! The man seemed sud- 
denly stripped of even the slight Dutch accent 
that had so stimulated my imagination. He 
stood before me a most painfully prosaic Yan- 
kee as he explained politely that he had been in 
San Francisco almost two years, but had never 
seen the " party in question." When I had 
succeeded in straightening out his ideas, how- 
ever, he had the grace to remember that one 
afternoon, the year before, some people calling 
themselves " The Stevenson Fellowship So- 
ciety " had taken possession of the cafe, made 
speeches and toasts and broken bread in mem- 
ory of Stevenson. After their strange banquet, 
they had all walked over to Portsmouth Square 
and planted an ivy from Scotland back of his 
monument. For in this city which never knew 
him when he was in her midst, there was 
erected a beautiful monument to " remember " 
him when he was gone. 

Although he applied for work on various 
newspapers, the payment offered was too small 
for one of his painstaking literary habits to 



288 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

consider, and with the exception of two articles 
published in the San Francisco Bulletin, he had 
no connection with the press of that city. 

Lonely, ill, and poor, estranged from his peo- 
ple, unsuccessful in his work, and discouraged 
in his attempt to maintain himself, yet meeting 
every fresh wave of defeat with the same in- 
domitable spirit — the picture we have of Ste- 
venson in San Francisco is indeed inspiring. 

In the face of unfavorable criticism of his 
work by his best friends at home, he is still 
" not disheartened." Confident there is some- 
thing in him worth saying, though he can't find 
what it is just yet, he is determined to " fum- 
ble for the new vein until he finds it." 

During his four and a half months' stay in 
San Francisco he turned out an immense 
amount of literary work, his essays on " Tho- 
reau," " Yoshida Torajiro," " Benjamin Frank- 
lin," " The Art of Virtue," " William Penn," 
and " Dialogue between Two Puppets," being 
all written and sent home at this time. Here 
also he finished " The Amateur Emigrant," the 
second part of which he says was " written in 
a circle of hell unknown to Dante, that of the 
penniless and dying author, for dying I was." 

" One of the causes which contributed to his 
illness," writes Sidney Colvin, " was the fa- 
tigue he underwent in helping to watch beside 



STEVENSON IN SAN FRANCISCO 289 

the sick-bed of a child, the son of his landlady. 
During March and a part of April he lay at 
death's door." 

On his marriage in May, 1880, to Fanny 
Van de Grift, he left at once with his wife and 
stepson for the little deserted mining camp of 
Calistoga, their life there being described in 
" Silverado Squatters." " The South Sea 
Idylls " which he read at this time fascinated 
him greatly, and it is probable, strengthened 
that impulse which in the end was to " cast him 
out as by a freshet upon those ultimate 
islands." 

Nine years later, ill and broken, he came 
once again to San Francisco, where the yacht 
Casco waited to take him on his far journey to 
the South Seas. How far a journey it was to 
be he little knew; but I think he would have 
embarked no less gladly had he realized that 
in very truth his ship was sailing toward the 
setting sun. 

Some thought like this the artist must have 
had when he designed his San Francisco monu- 
ment, a golden ship in full sail — fit emblem of 
a life " tossed with tempests, yet comforted " 
and comforting — a ship that sailed strange 
seas, that breasted many a wave and came at 
last into port with mast erect and colors gaily 
flying. 



290 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

In their admiration for Stevenson the writer, 
some people are apt to forget that the life he 
lived was greater than anything he wrote. 
The story of his wanderings, so full of pathos, 
heroism, and vital human interest, forms a 
kind of nineteenth century Odyssey that has 
thrilled our generation as does no piece of mere 
literature, ancient or modern. 

Of course the San Francisco period is only 
one brief chapter of this story. In all parts of 
the world travelers are constantly coming upon 
Stevenson's footprints: " Skerryvore " in Scot- 
land; Monterey on the Pacific coast; the little 
Swiss chalet in the mountains at Davos; the 
cottage by the wood at Saranac Lake; " La 
Solitude " at Hyeres; these and far away Val- 
ima with its mountain grave, all bear witness 
to his ceaseless quest for that one good the 
gods denied him, the gift of health, without 
which all his other gifts seemed so cruelly 
handicapped. 

And yet it is a question to what extent this 
lack of physical strength took from the value 
of his work as a whole, for if we recognize 
that the personality of the man adds the finish- 
ing touch of charm to his writing, we must re- 
member that the strength of his spirit was made 
perfect in the weakness of his flesh. Indeed, 
can we forget how often the undaunted soul of 



STEVENSON IN SAN FRANCISCO 291 

the man came to the rescue of his broken bocly, 
while his persistent will to live and will to work 
seemed for a season to conquer even fate it- 
self? It is for this above all else that men 
must love and revere him, — this courage which 
was Spartan in its simplicity and Christian in 
its essence, which had the appealing grace of 
sweetness, the immortal gift of light. His cour- 
age had also that rare quality of gaiety which 
enabled him to line with light the clouds that 
were forever closing in on his horizon; to re- 
solve that if in his corner the sun could not 
shine, the heavens for others ,should not be 
darkened. He had a silver tongue, and there 
was music and magic in his speech, but I love 
him most for his golden silences, for those 
times when he did not lift up his voice nor cry 
out — when his soul kept dumb faith with 
God. 



CHAPTER XVIII 
ARRIVEDERCI 1 

The year following our winter in Califor- 
nia, on a visit to the French Riviera after an 
absence of seven years, we found practically the 
entire region suffering from such a congestion 
of " trippers " and resorters that we were glad 
to shake the dust from our feet and set forth 
on a voyage of discovery along the romantic 
reaches of the less frequented Italian coast 
country. Not even the famous drive from 
Sorrento to Amalfi could be more delightfully 
picturesque than much of the motor trip from 
Nice to Genoa and from Genoa to Pisa, the 
only difficulty being the feeling of hopeless in- 
decision as to whether it would be better to 
yield to the attractions of some of the many 
seductive little spots along the way or to fol- 
low the lure of the road in the hope of finding 
even more idyllic conditions farther along. 

When we reached Rapallo, however, the 
charm of the little seaport village and the love- 
liness of its encircling hills laid hold upon us 

1 Italian for "till we meet again." 

292 



ARRIVEDERCI 293 

and banished all desire to discover anything 
better. An unobtrusive little hotel on the hill- 
side overlooking the harbor fitted into the land- 
scape as though it were an integral part of the 
scene, and here — " far from the pride of man 
and the strife of tongues " — we tarried many 
happy days, sailing the sea, climbing the moun- 
tains, making friends with the peasants, and 
catching an occasional glimpse into the heart 
and life of the people that shed new light on 
Italy's past and awakened new hope for her fu- 
ture. 

On one of our tramps we had stopped half- 
way up a mountain to eat our lunch and drink 
in the glorious view that lay before us, when a 
sturdy old peasant, who reminded me strangely 
of Jules Simoneau, came toiling up the path 
with a heavy load on his back. He paused in 
answer to our greeting, set down his pack, 
mopped his brow, and without further prelim- 
inaries plunged into an animated conversation, 
explaining how much good it always did him 
to talk to foreigners. Such occasions, we gath- 
ered, afforded him his only opportunities for 
the exchange of ideas and a free discussion of 
fundamental questions with intelligent people 
— who thought as he did. As for the peas- 
ants around Rapallo, he gave us to understand 
they were an " ignorant, priest-ridden lot, who 



294 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

looked at him askance because of his ideas of 
progress." Pointing to a lonely pine on the 
hill above us, he said, " I am like that pine, 
Signora, isolated from my fellows." 

He had a passion for reading, and his Bible 
and Mazzini's writings had been to him a nev- 
er-ceasing fountain of inspiration and delight. 
When we asked if he had ever seen Garibaldi 
or Mazzini, the smouldering fires of memory 
burst into sudden flame. His eyes glowed 
and his face shone as he told us of the never-to- 
be-forgotten days when he had fought with 
Garibaldi and heard Mazzini speak. 

" According to my way of thinking, Signori," 
he concluded, " Mazzini was the man of the 
century." It both stirred and surprised us to 
hear this spontaneous tribute to Italy's prophet 
son from the old peasant, for on going about 
the country we had been greatly disappointed 
at the apparent lack of appreciation of Maz- 
zini's services. While the figure of Victor 
Emmanuel greets one at every turn in Italy, 
and many little towns long ago mortgaged 
themselves (and are still paying interest on the 
debt) in order to erect a statue to Garibaldi, 
one seldom sees a monument to Mazzini. It 
was something of a revelation to find that what 
the proud aristocrats and comfortable bour- 
geois apparently have forgotten or perhaps 



ARRIVEDERCI 295 

never were able to comprehend, was not hid 
from the pure heart and childlike mind of this 
old peasant. Loving the great Garibaldi as 
only one of his own soldiers could, he yet was 
able to realize that not Garibaldi the soldier, 
nor Cavour the statesman, nor Victor Emman- 
uel the king, but Mazzini the prophet had given 
the vital, creative impulse to the movement for 
Italian unity by rousing to consciousness the 
soul of the Italian people. 

As we were finishing our lunch, the old man 
insisted on our drinking some wine from his 
gourd, saying that if we ever passed his little 
cabin there would be a flask of good Chianti 
from his own vines ready for us. He climbed 
a part of the way with us, often pausing and 
setting down his bundle in order to have free 
use of his arms and shoulders as he rolled out 
his sonorous phrases, for true Italian eloquence 
is a graceful combination of hand-work and 
tongue-play. There was fire and passion in his 
talk, and poetry in the soul of this simple peas- 
ant whose only tutors had been the Bible and 
Mazzini, and whom communion with God and 
Nature had indeed made wise. 

One dream that he has cherished all these 
years he still hopes before he dies to see real- 
ized, and that is to go once to Rome and see 
with his own eyes the capital of United Italy. 



296 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

When asked if he did not get discouraged some- 
times at the long delay, he replied with a pa- 
tient shrug of his shoulders that gave a pathetic 
emphasis to his words, " ( Coragg'io ) sempre 
coraggio/ 2 that is my motto ; I hope always 
for the best." However, Florence is a long 
step towards Rome, and he confided to us that 
he had a plan of selling his little vineyard near 
Rapallo and " establishing himself in Flor- 
ence," as the pompous Italian phrase puts it. 
We evidently did not appear sufficiently im- 
pressed with this dazzling prospect, for he re- 
peated the words, dwelling on each syllable with 
sonorous satisfaction, — " ho un progetto di sta- 
bilarmi in Firenzi." 

An English nobleman, it seems, who often 
had been to Rapallo, was also thinking of " es- 
tablishing himself " in a fine old castle in the 
neighborhood of Florence, and negotiations 
were even then under way which Giuseppi was 
confident would result in his becoming one of 
the gardeners of the place. To the glory of 
seeing Florence and ending his days there, was' 
to be added the joy of congenial companion- 
ship, for Giuseppi hinted that his lordship 
shared his own principles and believed also in 
" progress." I hope, indeed, that the plan 
went through, for it would be good to think 

2 Courage, always courage. 



ARRIVEDERCI 297 

that the solitary pine at last had been trans- 
planted into the friendly atmosphere of the old 
castle garden. 

At last we came to a little mountain shrine 
which marked the parting of our ways. Our 
stony path, made by monks centuries ago, moss- 
grown now and shaded by live-oaks, stretched 
along a narrow ridge that connected two moun- 
tain ranges like some bridge which Nature had 
swung high above the valley. On either side 
lay terraced hills, covered with olive-trees 
gnarled and twisted by the centuries into shapes 
of demons which, like the Biblical swine, 
seemed to be rushing headlong down into the 
sea. 

As we drank once more to the health of 
young Italy with this peasant who had fought 
to make her free, the act seemed almost like a 
sacrament. The old man stood silent for a 
moment, plunged in thought ; but suddenly rous- 
ing himself, he pointed to the mountains round 
about us — the serried ranks of the Apennines 
that stand guard over Italy. " Signori," he 
said simply, " the mountains remain motion- 
less, but unto man it is given to move; perhaps 
we shall meet again. Arrivederti" 

He soon was lost to view in the pine forest, 
but at intervals as we looked back we could dis- 
tinguish a little red Garibaldi handkerchief 



2 9 8 LURE AND LORE OF TRAVEL 

waving in the open spaces, and for a long time 
the friendly mountains kept bringing us the 
echo of his " arrive derci" grown fainter and 
fainter as the voice of the old man died away 
in the distance. 

And so, gentle reader, as the writing of 
books is a habit which once formed is not 
lightly broken possibly we can do ino better 
than take our leave of you in the words of the 
old Italian peasant, — " Arrive derci! " Who 
knows — qui lo saf — Perhaps we shall meet 
again ! 



